VII. Rise of the New Nazis
This is part of Agent of Influence, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In the winter of 1964, John le Carré and his wife moved to Vienna. While there, he consulted the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal for material for a novel. Like Fleming and Terry before him, he too was interested in the rise from the rubble of war criminals whose pasts had been given a polish.
This was research for A Small Town In Germany, published in 1968. Set in Bonn, it concerns Klaus Karfeld, an extremist politician gaining popularity in West Germany. Wiesenthal had helped le Carré build up a plausible backstory for the character, which is crucial to the plot: under an alias in the war, Karfeld was responsible for the gassing of 31 Jews as part of a Nazi medical programme.
As well as the themes of hidden pasts and resurgent Nazi leaders, the novel also mentions British war crimes investigations units in Germany and the post-war hunt for Nazi scientists to recruit for the West. It also features a minor character, Sam Allerton, an arrogant but influential British correspondent with ‘dead yellow eyes’ who ‘represents a lot of newspapers’ in Bonn. Allerton doesn’t work for British intelligence, but appears to have some knowledge of their activities and personnel. He remembers the protagonist, M.I.6 officer Turner, from two previous spy scandals, in Belgrade and Warsaw, which the press pack had been required to hush up ‘or the Ambassador wasn’t going to give us any more port’. Once again, le Carré seems to have been getting in a dig that the supposedly independent British press could be manipulated into towing the government line.
Le Carré might have been the first spy novelist to seek out Simon Wiesenthal, but he wouldn’t be the last. Terry was still on the trail of former Nazis, and was digging up new intelligence on their activities. In March 1963, he filed a report that presented dramatic new dimensions to his old stories from a decade or so previously on German missile scientists:
‘In Egypt’s closely guarded missile center Project 333, near Cairo, nearly 400 German scientists and technicians, most of them from the wartime German V-2 missile center at Peenemunde, are working on the first Egyptian-made rocket missile with warheads containing radioactive materials designed for President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Details of this work have been known to Bonn authorities for some time and have caused some concern here.
Israeli anxiety over the military effects of Egyptian rocket development on the power balance in the Mideast at a time when talks on federation of Egypt, Syria and Iraq are getting underway has led to the recent “underground war” by Israel agents in West Germany.
Their aim has been to buy off or scare off German experts engaged on this rocket work.
Though their efforts have been widespread and, according to some German sources, as efficiently organized as Eichmann kidnapping commandos, they have met with only moderate success.
One of the West Germans who vanished mysteriously last September is Heinz Krug, a former insurance clerk who ran a firm with headquarters in Munich, whose job was to purchase materials and technical equipment in Europe for Egypt’s missile research and construction.
After the war and before joining the Egyptians, Krug was a member of the German research physics under West Germany’s best-known missile expert, Prof. Eugen Saenger, who was among the first to advise Nasser on his rocket program.’
Terry reported that the core of this German scientific colony in Egypt were unrepentant Nazis, many of whom wanted ‘to continue the fight against the Jews’. Heading the German atomic missile research team in Cairo, he said, was
‘Prof. Wolfang Pilz, another Saenger man who during the last war was on Wernher von Braun’s staff in Peenemunde research station designing the V-1 flying bombs.’
Terry was far from the only journalist to write about this, but he explored the topic in much more detail than most, no doubt aided by his having studied it in-depth since the early ’50s and cultivated sources as a result. His article caused enough alarm to be cited in full in the U.S Congress’s House of Representatives.
He continued to investigate ex-Nazis’ activities until his death, but in 1967 he wrote an article on the theme that in many ways defined his career. On 23 July, the Sunday Times ran a story in which he had interviewed Simon Wiesenthal at length. In the article, Terry gave credence to Wiesenthal’s claim that Martin Bormann had escaped to south America with the help of a secret organization of former S.S. members known as ODESSA. The article caused a sensation, and was to have a ripple effect on the British thriller lasting several decades.
Terry’s description of ODESSA in the article could have come straight from a Fleming novel, with all the ingredients for a real-life version of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.:
‘It still has branches in West Germany, the Middle East and South America; its contacts inside the West German ministries, the police and security services of a dozen countries provide wanted top Nazis with an early warning system of attempts to arrest and extradite them.
With its network of “cells” all over the world, ODESSA has become a welfare fund to help Nazis who get caught, and to support their families while they are in jail…’
This was fantastic copy, bordering on the incredible. Terry even purported to know that ‘ODESSA’s leaders’ believed Bormann, ‘now 67’, was unlikely to be caught. It’s hard to see how he could possibly have known such a thing unless he had managed to earn the confidence of the group’s leaders and decided not to name any of them, which would have made for a significantly bigger scoop.
As with some of his previous reporting, his claims were next-to-impossible to disprove at the time. However, in 2009 British historian Guy Walters was able to investigate the history of ODESSA in declassified intelligence files. He concluded that there was no ‘vast and sinister network of former Nazis’ of that name; while there had been many small groups that had tried to assist Nazis in escaping justice after the war on an ad hoc basis, no ‘globalized tentacled monster’ of the kind Terry had described existed. Walters also pointed out that ODESSA’s acronym was supposed to derive from ‘Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen’, meaning ‘The Organization of Former S.S. Members’, and that this was a supremely unlikely name for a ‘highly secret society of cunning former S.S. men’ to use.
Walters concluded that Simon Wiesenthal had been fed bogus information about ODESSA by Wilhelm Höttl, a former counter-intelligence chief in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) who had managed to escape prosecution for war crimes by acting as a witness against his former colleagues at Nuremberg. U.S. intelligence had used Höttl to run agent networks, but sacked him in 1949 as they felt he was untrustworthy. A 1950 report to a U.S. counter-intelligence unit in Austria claimed that Höttl had since been recruited by Wiesenthal as a source on Nazi escape organizations, but that the content of the intelligence he was providing was ‘grossly exaggerated’.
Walters concluded that Wiesenthal had in turn duped Antony Terry with Höttl’s information:
‘If Terry’s editor had known that the ultimate source of much of the piece was a duplicitous former SD man, then he might have put the article on the spike. Or probably not. After all, it was a great story.’
The following year, Terry reported another sensation: he had found Martin Bormann alive. Well, nearly: he had found a former S.S. corporal named Erich Wiedwald who insisted he knew how Bormann had escaped from Berlin and that he was now living in Brazil, ‘a mile inland from the west bank of the Parana river’ on an estate named Kolonie Waldber 555. Terry had spent 11 days interviewing Wiedwald and insisted that his story, while unproven, constituted ‘the most detailed, consistent and verifiably accurate account of Martin Bormann’s post-war existence that has so far been offered’. Once again, none of it was possible to disprove at the time, and even after Bormann’s remains were discovered the stories kept appearing.
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Terry had not single-handedly created the fascination with Bormann, though with the imprimatur of the Sunday Times he had given such stories much more legitimacy than they deserved. The same could be said of his reporting into Odessa, which captured the imagination of Frederick Forsyth, who was looking for a follow-up to his bestselling debut The Day of The Jackal.
The Odessa File was nearly as big a hit as its predecessor, and it was triggered by Forsyth reading Terry’s Sunday Times article on it. Forsyth had been a journalist himself, working for Reuters and the B.B.C, and like Terry had reported from Biafra. In his 2015 memoir The Outsider, he admitted that he had also helped out M.I.6 with several assignments, using his status as a correspondent as a cover. Although he didn’t name it, Frederick Forsyth, too, was part of the BIN network.
The novel’s protagonist is Peter Miller, a German reporter who gets wind of a powerful secret organisation helping former Nazis. The first half of Miller’s investigation into ODESSA closely follows Forsyth’s own research, including a visit to Simon Wiesenthal and another to Antony Terry himself in Bonn. In the novel, the ‘doyen of the British foreign correspondents’ corps’ is named Anthony Cadbury, a pun on the fact that Terry and Cadbury are both British brands of chocolate. The shrewd-eyed Cadbury shows Miller his reports of Nazi war crime tribunals he had covered, just as Terry did Forsyth in real life.
‘Fortunately, Cadbury was a methodical man and had kept every one of his despatches from the end of the war onwards. His study was lined with box-files along two walls. Besides these, there were two grey filing cabinets in one corner.
‘I run the office out of my home,’ he told Miller as they entered the study. ‘This is my own filing system, and I’m about the only one who understands it. Let me show you.’’
Forsyth also pulled in another story Terry had reported on: the German missile scientists helping Nasser in Egypt. As in Terry’s 1963 article on the subject, they plan to ‘destroy the Jews once and for all’, now as part of ODESSA, working out of a rocket factory north of Cairo known as ‘Factory 333’.
‘To open a factory is one thing; to design and build rockets is another. Long since, the senior supporters of Nasser, mostly with pro-Nazi backgrounds stretching back to the Second World War, had been in close contact with the Odessa representatives in Egypt. From these came the answer to the Egyptians’ main problem—the problem of acquiring the scientists necessary to make the rockets.
Neither Russia, America, Britain nor France would supply a single man to help. But the Odessa pointed out that the kind of rockets Nasser needed were remarkably similar in size and range to the V.2 rockets that Werner von Braun and his team had once built at Peenemunde to pulverise London. And many of his former team were still available….
The Odessa appointed a chief recruiting officer in Germany, and he in turn employed as his leg-man a former SS-sergeant, Heinz Krug. Together they scoured Germany looking for men prepared to go to Egypt and build Nasser’s rockets for him.
With the salaries they could offer they were not short of choice recruits. Notable among them were Professor Wolfgang Pilz, who had been repatriated from post-war Germany by the French and had later become the father of the French Véronique rocket, itself the foundation of De Gaulle’s aerospace programme. Professor Pilz left for Egypt in early 1962. Another was Dr Heinz Kleinwachter; Dr Eugen Saenger and his wife Irene, both formerly on the von Braun V.2 team also went along, as did Doctors Josef Eisig and Kirmayer, all experts in propulsion fuels and techniques.’
Terry would not have been the only source for all of this information: some of these details had been reported by other journalists and Forsyth doubtless dug up more in own research, either by consulting Terry directly as he had done for ODESSA, or through other sources he cultivated within intelligence and the arms industry (he, too, looks to have been involved with Terrys’s friend Tony Divall). Nevertheless, with the novel’s information about ODESSA supplemented by a mass of background material on the history of German missile scientists, Terry’s influence had once again seeped into a thriller-writer’s fictional world.
As he had done in The Day of the Jackal, Forsyth was pushing a technique Ian Fleming had favoured into new territory. This was to treat sensational background material as though reporting it in a newspaper. By using the language of journalism to relay authentic or authentic-sounding information, the excitement of a thriller became more intense, because one had the eerie impression one was reading about real events. This technique, known as ‘faction’, would dominate British thrillers of the latter part of the Cold War, pioneered by Forsyth. A large number of these thrillers featured surviving Nazi war criminals, quite frequently Martin Bormann. That all kicked off with The Odessa File in 1972.
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Anthony Cadbury was a well-informed source for Peter Miller, but Forsyth carefully avoided any suggestion that the character was currently involved in intelligence work. Perhaps he needn’t have been so coy: after all, Sarah Gainham had openly had a protagonist playing such a role in The Stone Roses over 15 years earlier.
Not too long after that novel appeared, the Soviets learned about BIN. In the summer of 1959, M.I.6 officer and double agent George Blake returned from Berlin to take up a position at the London Station, where he worked with the frequent traveller programme, and also learned all about the wider work of the department. His designation was BIN 01/A.
As of that date, then, Soviet intelligence almost certainly knew the names of everyone who had been involved in the network before Blake joined it and while he was there. Confirming this, in 1968, the Soviets exposed the existence of the network in their press, using Blake’s knowledge of it and possibly also information provided by Kim Philby, who had also been involved in it shortly before his defection: David Astor at The Observer had given him a job on the paper, reporting to M.I.6. All the British journalists and editors named by the Soviets denied any involvement, and the scandal soon died down and was forgotten. But some of these secrets had been there all along, hidden between the lines of spy novels.