14 February 2010
The Mystery Man
(Ruins of the Führerbunker at the Wolf's Lair near Ketrzyn, Poland)
I am sick and tired of food, and writing about it; I am weary of the house and nearly everything I can see within it; I despise the white concrete covering that cloaks the streets and sidewalks and is piled up higher than my head.
I loath the drivers who are whipping around the blind corners, oblivious to pedestrians when I am on foot, as I was yesterday on an emergency run to provide my sole shovel to my son, so that he might start chipping at the icy mound that covers his car.
Everyone was out yesterday, attempting to make up for lost time and postponed errands. Some of the lunatics behind the wheel are oblivious to ice and lack of lanes. The street in front of my son’s place is a single lane, both curbs mounded up in buried cars, and the two rutted tracks in the middle are a combat zone for cars approaching from both directions.
I finally beat a retreat to Tunnel Eight and did the taxes. It was that bad.
It is Valentines Day, too, and if I am not sitting here alone with my cat, I feel the call for decisive action.
The only cat with whom I have a personal association is at the farm, maybe, and I think I will play the man of action and venture down to see how much damage has been done to the property in the storms.
On the way to that I ran across one of those stories that creates a dent in the unifying field theory of How Things Work.
We have talked about the VENONA project that was run across the street at Arlington Hall Station. Army and later NSA code-breakers exploited wartime carelessness in the way Soviet spymasters were communicating with Moscow about their American agents.
The code-breaking was hard enough, and not of the same rich texture of the bulk codes of the Nazis that were compromised so thoroughly in the ULTRA program. Cover names were used for the agents themselves, and people like Alger Hiss at the State Department spent the rest of their lives denying that they had been Soviet stooges.
It was not until the KGB archives were briefly opened that the covers were blown, and the real identity of the agents was made known.
That is all fascinating, that and the fact that it was done right here in the neighborhood lent a certain personal scale to the history.
It was a missing piece to a puzzle that had been secret for way too long.
I remember when the existence of ULTRA was finally disclosed officially, twenty-five years after the end of WW II. All those memoirs and carefully burnished reputations had to re-assessed in light of the fact that we had been reading the Fuhrer’s mail right through most of the conflict.
It was a tectonic shift in the way I looked at history, and the business of intelligence. It had everything to do with seeking out a chance to do this stuff for a career.
It was exhilarating, knowing the secrets. But at this long vista, I was pretty sure we knew everything there was to know about that War.
I was wrong.
The Times (of London, the real one) posted a curious article by Ben Macintyre who maintains that the Secret intelligence Service (better known as MI6) had a key agent in the Nazi hierarchy code-named Knopf. He ran several sub-agents with outstanding access to German war plans, and even personal access to the Fuhrer himself.
That blew me away.
Researchers at Cambridge were going through the Churchill Archives and the wartime papers in the National Archives and out popped Agent Knopf.
His real name is still a secret; MI6 still has the records, maybe, that would show who it was. He disclosed everything from the location of the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair, or more accurately, "redoubt") Headquarters in East Prussia to the maniacal fixation Hitler had with capturing Stalingrad.
The defeat there resulted in the loss of the entire SIXTH Army under poor General von Paulus, and you can argue that was the pivot point in the whole massive global conflict.
There were setbacks, of course, but after that, the Allies never really lost a major campaign.
Knopf also relayed intentions of the German high command to invade Malta; details of the 1943 summer campaign against the Russians when the whole matter was still much in doubt, and even the health of Desert Fox Irwin Rommel.
Knopf- or Agent 594, take your pick- was not a British asset, which may account for his obscurity. He was recruited originally by the Poles, whose contribution to WW II SIGINT and HUMINT sources turned out to be warbreakers.
The Poles contributed the first commercial model of the ENIGMA enciphering machine. They also recruited an agent net that penetrated the security around the High Command of the German Army, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW).
It was a British naval officer who ran the liaison with the exiled Poles, Commander Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale. He was a buddy of Ian Fleming, in the small world of MI6, and is one of the several models for the fictional James Bond. I love those nick-names, don’t you? I wonder what they called Commander Bond back in Public School.
The best reporting from Agent Knopf was apparently done between February of 1942 and mid-1943, the years of the greatest peril. I would have to see the files to know if the reporting continued, or if Knopf was scooped up with the others in the wake of the failed 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair in the abortive operation VALKERIE.
Knopf’s reports would have been of the utmost sensitivity, and would certainly have been of interest to the PM. The insights would have contributed, along with the ULTRA material, to the basic strategy of the war.
Who was Knopf? His identity may be known to the archivists at MI6, though they are not talking. Apparently there are still some closed files, many wars later. For the moment, Agent Knopf remains nameless, just as the traitor Alger Hiss did for all those years.
In the case of Agent Knopf, I would like to know who he was. They ought to erect a statue some place. Maybe at the ruins of the Wolf’s Lair, which with thanks to Knopf, is now on Polish soil.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!