Great Improbabilities

TOTAL ESPIONAGE--Curt Riess--Putnam ($2.75).

Adolf Hitler once remarked of his hopes and methods: "The greatest improbability is the most certain." If this book had no other value, it would make that statement dangerously clear. For the Nazis, relying as always upon the moderate rationality of the world at large, have made such use of "improbabilities" as amounts to cold genius. Nowhere have they used them more brilliantly and systematically than in the art of espionage.

Witty, vain, gregarious Curt Riess is a former German journalist who went to Paris when Hitler came in, became U.S. correspondent for Paris-soir in 1934. His U.S. stuff (particularly on Hollywood) was syndicated all over Europe. Now a resident of Manhattan, he is married to an editor of Collier's, writes for the Saturday Evening Post. His friends: Raoul de Roussy de Sales, Thomas Mann, Dorothy Thompson.

Total Espionage is 1) an analysis of Nazi methods, organization, successes; 2) a sketch of the piteous failure of the Allies in the same field; 3) a heartening if somewhat thin prognosis based on the awakening of the Western Hemisphere to danger and to action. By its very nature such a book can be neither complete nor wholly reliable. But it is the fullest treatment of an absorbing and important subject so far in World War II.

The Organization. The Allies, in espionage as in war, floundered along in traditional forms: spying was essentially military, to be practised by professionals. Unfortunately they had to cope with an enemy which, having revolutionized warfare, revolutionized espionage too. While France's time-honored Deuxieme Bureau hopefully trained its second-string Mata Haris, and while Prime Ministers Chamberlain and Baldwin blandly ignored as "exaggerated" (substitute Hitler's "improbable") the catastrophic findings of Britain's brilliant 64, the Germans set in motion "the greatest espionage organization that had ever existed." Typically, Goebbels compiled a blacklist of all the worn-out tricks which the secret agents of the rest of the world still used.

The founding brains of this tremendous machine, according to Riess, were Walther Nicolai, Ludendorff, Goebbels, Himmler, and above all Rudolf Hess, "the only really great adventurer of the Nazi Party." It grew out of Nicolai's conversations with Ludendorff on the nature of total action; out of Goebbels' and Himmler's intelligent respect for the methods of Lenin (the Gestapo was "a complete plagiarism of the OGPU"); and out of Hess's studies under Geopolitician Professor Karl Haushofer. Haushofer assigned his star pupil the study of Japan--a study which Hess promptly narrowed to "Japan and Espionage," and on which he wrote a 40,000-word thesis which may be regarded as the Magna Charta for the hidden eyes of the New Order.

In 1933-34, Hess developed his Liaison Staff, an organization whose three basic principles, in utter departure from previous Occidental practice, were: "Everyone can spy. Everyone must spy. Everything can be found out."

By the end of 1934, Total Espionage was ready to function. Its setup:

> The Intelligence Service of the War Ministry (under Nicolai).

> The Organization of Germans Living Abroad (the AO; under Ernst Wilhelm Bohle).

> The Foreign Department of the Gestapo (under Himmler and Himmler's chief killer Reinhard Heydrich).

>The Foreign Political Office (uunder Rosenberg).

> The Special Service of the Foreign Office (under Ribbentrop and Canaris).

> The Foreign Department of the Propaganda Ministry (under Goebbels and Hermann Esser).

>The Foreign Department of the Ministry of Economics and Finance (under Schacht).

> The Reich Colonial Office (under General von Epp).

All these were subordinate to the Liaison Staff of which Hess was chairman. Its members included Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Bohle, Otto Abetz, Ley. There was also that "laboratory for the science of conquest," The Institute of Geopolitics, whose 1,000-odd researchers supplied it with "a series of X-ray pictures of all the countries of the world."

At Work. This great machine worked dually: aboveground, and under. While Rosenberg, as "Underground Foreign Minister," played for internal revolution and collective treachery (Riess is sure that every South American political crisis since 1933 has a German somewhere in its woodpile), men like Ribbentrop took care of individual, strategic and semiconscious traitors. Ribbentrop snake-charmed the Cliveden set, with the help of Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe-Waldenbourg-Schillingsfurst, who modestly confessed before a British court that it was she who made Munich possible. Canaris, who had worked with Mata Hari in Spain, founded Personnel Department B.

Personnel Department B's special function was "to comb the world for potential 'Quislings.' " Goebbels, with his fat dossiers on the vulnerabilities of all foreign notables, believed that treason was a surer method than revolution. In Belgium, for instance, Rosenberg's Degrelle movement failed; but Personnel Department B obtained the services of Henri de Man, with his influence over Leopold; and Lieut. Dombret of the Belgian General Staff sold Germany Belgium's secret plans for defense long before the war broke out. Agents of the Department-B type also got such unbribable men as Petain and Weygand where they wanted them. Despite the pre-war Parisian wisecrack, "Did you know that our Foreign Minister is also in the pay of the French?," many reputable friends of Bonnet still cannot believe he was a traitor. Riess claims to know better, gives the reason why: Goebbels had in his possession "a rather large" canceled check which M. Bonnet had received from M. Stavisky.

Biggest of Joseph Goebbels' seven departments is Counter-Action, where "the separate threats of propaganda and espionage are knit together." By 1937 it controlled some 330 German-language newspapers in non-German countries; good reporters can also be good spies. The Department also made notable use of movie companies: one filmed Robinson Crusoe (never released) on a strategic island off South America; another made a huge documentary (never released) of Poland, in 1938. Artists were useful, too, from a great Wagnerian soprano down to second-grade cabaret girls. And servant girls--between 1933 and 1939 some 20,000 of them went to Holland and 14,000 to England--and the famous Nazi "tourists." All over the world the Department placed its agents in radio stations; in the more backward countries, Germans installed and operated transmitters for virtually nothing. They held the planet in a net as instantaneous as light.

The AO. Ernst Wilhelm Bohle at 31 undertook to execute Hess's idea that everyone can and must spy. By 1937 he had the services of 70,000 to 100,000 sailors on German ships and of some 3,000.000 German "housemaids, grocery clerks, beauty-parlor operators, nurses, chauffeurs, opera singers, bookkeepers," who lived abroad. Their work: In weekly reports, the answering of "hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands" of questions: questions not only military and economic, but intimately worming forth the subtlest anthropological details of civilian psychology, habit, morale. This information was screened for its gold-dust in the consulates, and sent where it would do the most good.

Herr Bohle divided his bright-eyed world into eight Territorial Bureaus, of which North America's No. 6 was established in the spring of 1932. Head of No. 6 was, until recently, one Walter H. Schellenberg. Before the U.S. started paying him serious attention, Herr Schellenberg, making the most of this "paradise for spies," enjoyed the services of no less than 50,000 weekly contributors. Yet so modest was he with his power that in his last public appearance (he skipped the country last July), he could sit among other patriots on the platform, in Madison Square Garden, at the great Wheeler-Lindbergh Rally of March 22, 1941. "He smiled benignly throughout the proceedings, and occasionally waved a small American flag."

Author Riess gives useful public warning of the fact that the closing of the German consulates does only so much good. With its above-and-below-ground dual flexibility, the machine is capable of swift adjustment. The weekly data can be handled, now, through the German Embassy and through the diplomatic and consular offices of Italy, Japan, France, Spain; it can also be detoured through Central and South America.

Kickback. Author Riess sketches the no less intricate devices which hold South America, Mexico, the Near East, before the Nazi fluoroscope. He tells of the not too satisfactory efforts to collaborate with the Japanese, who invented total espionage, but who lack judgment and are also stingy with information of value.

He closes his book with a few loud notes of hope: One is a salute to the FBI, which has, with the collaboration of some 150,000 local police, put counter-espionage on a national basis. One is a tribute to those "unknown soldiers," the private citizens of Occupied Europe who are collaborating with British spies and British bombers in a little total espionage of their own. One is the most pleasing version yet of the causes of the Hess Flight and the Russian war.

Riess's story of the Hess Flight, which he gives not as theory but as fact: Months before, 64 agents began filtering into Germany letters signed (it seemed) by members of that pro-Hitler, super-Cliveden Set, The Link. Their urgent gist: Linksmen awaited only a Sign, a Great Gesture on Germany's part, to overthrow a wobbling Churchill, betray England, end England's war. The surest conceivable gesture, they suggested, would be to open war on Russia.

Hess nibbled, flew to Madrid to check up, swallowed great lumps of bait prepared for him there; at length, to B4's complete astonishment, came to Britain in person. After his capture, but behind Churchill's back (so far as Hess knew), he was visited by Ivone Augustine Kirkpatrick who had --supposedly--written him many of the letters. Kirkpatrick then went to Dublin, with a letter from Hess, where he met with members of the German Embassy.

What Hess wrote, in code, no Englishman knows. But within three weeks, Germany was at war for the first time with an enemy she had underestimated. Something of the value of Total Espionage may be measured between the greased-rail destruction of Western Europe, where it functioned perfectly, and the unpleasant surprise in the East, where it did by no means.

Riess's story on Hess is improbable enough. So is much else in his book. So, not long ago, was Hitler.

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