A few days before meeting Navarre, Madeleine had received a postcard from Lahousen. It was postmarked Madrid: ‘The time is coming. When can I write to you again? May God protect you and yours.’
And so it was that a line of communication which would over time develop into one of the most valuable spy channels of World War II was opened up between Erwin Lahousen, now a senior officer at Abwehr headquarters in the Tirpitzufer, and Hitler’s enemies. What would follow over the next two years was a stream of information which would prove extremely useful to the Allies and harmful to Hitler’s cause. It was information of a very specific and precise nature, including dates, names, plans and places, all passed in a professional manner from Erwin to Madeleine, not as part of their love affair, but under its cover. Speaking after the war, Madeleine said: ‘He knew nothing explicitly about the true nature of my secret mission [as a French spy]. I thought it preferable to say nothing which might trouble his conscience; we both understood that there were some things which were better left unsaid.’ Lahousen, however, knew well enough that she was working for French intelligence, and that the information he gave her would be passed on to the West, as he admitted in the full report on his activities which he provided to the Allies after the war.
So, if Lahousen knew the true destination of the information he was giving Madeleine, did Wilhelm Canaris know it too? That Lahousen sent Madeleine to the French attaché with her ‘non-message’ immediately after spending a whole day with Canaris, and accepting his invitation to go to Berlin, seems unlikely to be just a coincidence. To this should be added the fact that Canaris and Lahousen were very close, and also very professional. Each was to depend for his very life on the integrity and judgement of the other in the years to come. Given these factors, it seems safe to presume that Canaris knew perfectly well what his subordinate was doing – and that he approved of it.
Erwin Lahousen and the Austrian Abwehr were not the only people to know of the German invasion of Austria before it happened.
Two hundred and fifty kilometres north-west of Vienna, Czech intelligence in Prague were also aware of what was about to happen, thanks to German codes which had been passed to them by an Abwehr officer four months previously.
It had all begun on 8 February 1936, when a man of medium height in his mid-thirties, with a Prussian haircut, prominent eyes surrounded by smile lines, brown hair and slightly bowed legs, boarded the night train from Dresden to the Czechoslovak town of Brück, fifteen kilometres south of the Czech–German border. The following morning he breakfasted in the station buffet, posted a letter in a local postbox, and returned to Dresden on the next train.
So began the career of one of World War II’s most remarkable spies.
It is often possible to gauge the importance of a spy by the number of his or her aliases. Over the next seven years this man would be known as ‘R.V.’, ‘F.M.’, ‘Agent A54’, ‘Voral’, ‘Josef Koehler’, ‘François’, ‘René’, ‘Dr Holm’, ‘Dr Steinberg’, both ‘Eva’ and ‘Peter’ ‘Teman’, ‘Jochen Breitner’, ‘Emil Schwarz’, ‘Karl’, ‘Petr Tooman’ and ‘Traitor X’. Indeed, so elusive was he that his true identity was only established beyond doubt after the war. We now know him as Paul Thümmel, one-time master baker, founder member of the Nazi Party, holder of the party’s golden badge, friend of Himmler, and in 1936 a member of Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr station in Dresden, which was charged with spying on Czechoslovakia.
Two days after Thümmel posted his letter, an unmarked blue envelope arrived in the office of Major Josef Bartik of the Czechoslovak intelligence service in Victory Square, Prague. It was postmarked ‘Brück’, and hand-addressed in German to the Ministry of National Defence, Intelligence Section.
When Bartik opened the envelope he found the kind of offer a spy chief can only dream of:
The author of this letter offers his services to the Czech Intelligence Service …
After this greeting, the writer, who wrote in badly-spelt German and signed himself ‘F.M.’, listed the kind of intelligence to which he had access: German intelligence requirements for 1935 and 1936; details of German infantry, armour, air force, police, Gestapo and customs units; the new organisation table of all German intelligence and security structures; the names and addresses of all the senior personnel in the Gestapo, Abwehr and civil service; and the names and codenames of German intelligence officers working on Czechoslovakia, together with their agents, wireless networks and codes. Bartik concluded from this list that the would-be spy clearly had access to information well beyond the reach of a normal junior member of the Abwehr.
Having laid out his wares, ‘F.M.’ set his terms:
1. You shall never know my name
2. I will never meet you on Czech territory
3. If measures have to be taken as a result of the information I give you must use it with extreme care and avoid making the Germans suspicious of me
4. I want 15,000 marks in German currency in old notes, 4,000 marks of which should reach me within three weeks, as I have a debt to pay off.
He ended his letter in a way which left no doubt that he was a professional in the business of spying:
I shall await your reply, poste restante, each time in a different town of Saxony and Bavaria. Your reply to this letter will determine whether I pass my information to you, or offer it to French Intelligence. I also expect to receive, with your reply, an advance to buy a camera and settle other expenses. My offer is genuine and you need have no fear that your money will be wasted. I ask you to reply … by 14 February at the latest. This does not give you much time, but I am at present in Saxony, near the frontier.
On the face of it, this was a sensational offer – almost too good to be true. And that was the problem. ‘F.M.’ was what is known in the spying trade as a ‘walk in’, and they are often used as bait for a trap.
Major Bartik was a cautious man – and he had good reason to be. He had already used just such a ploy to fool Canaris into paying huge sums for totally worthless intelligence. This coup resulted in the Abwehr chief christening his Czech opponent, not without a degree of admiration, ‘the limping devil’ because of his effectiveness and a rolling gait caused by a First World War leg wound. Not long previously, moreover, one of Bartik’s officers had been kidnapped by the Germans at a meeting with an agent close to the Czech–German border. By the time Bartik finally got his man back, he had been so badly tortured by the Gestapo that he had to be confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life.
Bartik’s reply to F.M. was guarded:
Sir, Your communication interests me. Although you give no guarantees, I enclose the advance you asked for. The money is yours even if you fail to supply the information promised in your letter. The total sum will be paid within three weeks if you permit us to examine the material. Please reply to the following address: Karl Schimek, Prague XIX Dostalova 16.
Thus began the cautious minuet played out between spy-master and potential spy, as each tries to assess the balance of advantage and risk involved in a relationship. Finally, after much to-ing and fro-ing, Bartik agreed to meet F.M. at 8.30 on the evening of Saturday, 4 April at a deserted steam mill set amongst trees, fifty metres on the Czech side of the frontier with Germany and close to the village of Vejprty.
It was a cold night, with low cloud and misty rain blown along on a boisterous breeze. The wind buffeted a loose flap on the corrugated-iron roof of the mill, making it bang loudly. The street lamps hanging on wires in the middle of the village roads swung in wild circles, sending strange shadows lurching out in all directions. Two of Bartik’s men, armed with pistols, stood in a deep pool of blackness on one side of the mill, and a little way back, tucked discreetly in a copse of trees, were three cars containing Bartik and half a dozen of his men armed with automatics. The Vejprty church clock struck