Spying On The Reich | Historical
56:47 Share

You're not going to believe.

This, Scamanda, premieres Thursday night, January 30th on ABC and stream on Hulu.

You know what's smart? Enjoying a fresh gourmet meal at home that you didn't have to cook. Meet Factor, your loophole in the laws of mealtime. Chef-crafted meals delivered with a tap, ready in just two minutes. You know what's even smarter? Treating yourself without cheating your goals. Factor is dietician-approved, chef-prepared, and you-plated. Pretty smart, huh? Refresh your routine and eat smart with Factor. Learn more at factormeals.com.

Content warning. This episode contains violent scenes and strong language from the outset. This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know?

What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Spying on the Reich. October 6th, 1920. In a vast forested park on the outskirts of Munich, a man takes a brisk morning walk, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the autumn chill.

He is blissfully alone, lost in a dawn reverie, until something catches his eye beneath the tree line. He sees this body, this torso hanging from a rope. A very shocking, terrible sight. At first, he doubts himself. Surely this is just a trick of the weak morning light. But as he draws nearer, the image becomes sharper. A woman hangs limply from a tree.

The man rushes to her, but she is already gone. Up close, he can see a note strung from her neck. The handwriting hurried and crude, but perfectly legible. It says, you bitch, you've betrayed your country. And then it said, the black hand have delivered justice. With those blood-curdling words branded on his memory, the man rushes out of the park to find help.

Soon enough, police arrive at the scene and begin to piece together a brutal story. The body was that of a young woman who had fallen on hard times. Her story was very tragic, as indeed so many people's story was. So many people were destitute throughout Western Europe at the time. The woman's name is Marie Sandmeier.

Until recently, she was employed as a domestic servant in the household of a Bavarian aristocrat. She'd been made redundant, very tragically, from her job and she was hard up. And she'd answered an advert in some public place. She'd seen an advert for information about hidden arms caches. Germany is still reeling from its defeat in the Great War. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles dictate that the country must surrender the vast majority of its arms...

All over the land, foreign officials use local police forces to hunt down stockpiles of weapons. And Marie Sandmeier had volunteered information on one such cache. Because of what she'd known and the information that she'd gathered from her previous employer, Pidsactor, she needed the money and she obviously has some sort of inside information about where these arms caches were. The police promised to protect the identity of anyone offering information.

But protection is not what Marie was given. The information that we have is that when she went to the police, the police were well connected with other people who didn't want anything to happen, who didn't want those arms caches discovered, and they took their vengeance. In other words, the young woman was betrayed, offered up to the nefarious forces that lurk in the rubble of post-war Munich. The name of their operation boldly scrawled on the note around Marie's neck.

It was a very mysterious collection, informal collection of mainly former German army officers and their sympathizers.

who were effectively conspiring to subvert the very draconian terms that the Allies had placed upon Germany after their defeat in the First World War. The basic underlying purpose of this self-declared Black Hand was to prevent the demilitarization of Germany, which meant that arms weren't going to be surrendered as they should have been to the occupying Allied powers.

Marie Sandmeier is by no means the first victim to fall foul of the black hand, nor will she be the last. There were a series of murders, a good number of people, roughly between five and ten, but possibly, one never knows, considerably more are thought to have died at the hands of this very vindictive group. Some very brutal deaths like drownings and war hangings in the same way that the young woman had suffered. The actions of this despicable vigilante group are no doubt shocking.

But for anyone paying close attention, they are also revealing. With violence, the Black Hand articulates a sentiment that is already taking root in Germany, where the twin blow of vast territorial losses and a neutered military has left a once mighty nation on its knees.

This was considered not only by the general German public to be a national disgrace, but also particularly for German officers or former army officers to

to be a matter not only of severe personal pride, but also a very dangerous moment for Germany because it was so vulnerable to attacks from outside, most obviously by Poland, which was deemed to be a long-term threat, but also possibly by the Soviet Union, where the new Bolshevik regime was regarded as a clear threat.

And so, Germany finds itself in a moment of existential crisis. One that some people believe it cannot survive.

Extremists like the ones who murdered a young woman and strung her up in a park one morning in 1920.

From our vantage point in history, the black hand may appear little more than a gruesome footnote in a turbulent chapter of history. But look closer. Contained within this tale...

A prescient warning about all that is to follow. I think the kind of brutality and fanaticism that one needs to kill somebody for a cause like that is self-evident. And I think it did give some interesting indication of the kind of brutality and fanaticism that lay ahead both in the 1920s as Hitler started to come to power and thereafter in 1933 when Hitler seized power. I think it is very significant. Already in Germany, a storm is brewing.

Soon, the National Socialist Party will arrive with their promises to rebuild this humbled nation. For those foreign powers who sought to declaw Germany, there is much to fear.

I think foreign intelligence services and a lot of foreign observers started to become particularly interested in events in Germany around about 1922. I mean, that's when some foreign observers started to notice and comment on Hitler and the kind of abilities he had and his ability to, for example, sway an audience and win an audience.

But it was probably a bit later on, probably around about September 1930, when I think a lot of people, a lot of foreign intelligence services and, say, foreign observers, really took notice of what was going on in Germany because that was when Hitler made his breakthrough.

The efforts of those foreign intelligence services to understand and contain the escalating situation within the tinderbox of post-war Germany represent an often overlooked chapter in the history of espionage until now.

It's about time I introduced you to the man who has labored to uncover this story. My name is Roger Howard. I'm the author of Spying on the Reich, the Cold War against Hitler. In that book, Roger Howard makes his case for a first proto-Cold War, one that took place between Germany and the powers that sought to keep it in check in the 1920s and 30s. This was a dangerous, chaotic time.

one in which Germany's opponents were seldom aligned in their efforts. I think that a lot of intelligence agencies, even in a best-case scenario, are always going to be relatively chaotic, I would argue, mainly because there's so much for them to deal with. And of course, even in a best-case scenario, there's always so much rivalry within departments, within agencies, and between agencies within a specific country. But in the 1930s, there was a particular amount of rivalry, a particular amount of disorganization,

not just because of relative underfunding, but also because these differences reflect not just differences of opinion about where a perceived threat might be emerging. Was it in various parts of the empire? Was it from the Soviet Union? Was it from Germany? Was it from France? It was also because they mirrored more general national differences.

And almost every country you can think of seemed to have some sort of territorial hang up or some degree of suspicion, largely left over or at least aggravated by the experiences of the First World War. That makes painting a coherent picture of the intelligence landscape in the interwar period a daunting task. But if anyone is game to the challenge, it's Roger Howard.

Over the course of this story, he's going to guide you through three key moments in this early Cold War. Three spies, three nations, three different approaches. Each one represents an attempt to assert some control over a rapidly deteriorating geopolitical situation.

As we know, the stakes could scarcely be higher, particularly for the unfortunate nations that shared a border with Germany. Poland was and of course remains in such a difficult and vulnerable geographical position. This is still true today, obviously, with the Ukraine war and the perceived threat from Russia. And it was, of course, true in the 1920s, again, worried about this new regime on its eastern border in the Soviet Union that has suddenly emerged. What's it going to do? What's its ambitions? But also specifically towards Germany.

The Germans had lost territory in the east after the Treaty of Versailles. In particular, the Germans are hugely aggrieved about the Polish Corridor, which gave Poland a corridor to the Baltic Sea. And they want to take back control over Konigsberg and Danzig, which have been long-term German possessions. Poland's unenviable position

caught between a young expansionist power on the East and a wounded, embittered empire on the West, necessitated a proactive attitude towards intelligence. Their national spy agency was known as the Second Department, and it was, by the standards of the day,

rather well resourced. The Poles were willing to allocate more money to their intelligence and military intelligence department, the Second Department, and that reflected how deep their concerns were about the prospect of a rapidly emerging threat on both sides of their borders. So the Second Department is in a position to undertake some very considerable amounts of undercover surveillance and espionage within other countries, most notably Germany.

That undercover surveillance required a steady stream of capable operatives, ready to step into the fray. But none are more storied than Jerzy Sosnowski.

Jerzy Sosnowski, from what we know about him, he was a former soldier, cavalry officer or cavalry soldier in the First World War. He was a native German speaker, having served in the Austro-Hungarian army. What we know about him, the picture that emerges of a very charming personality who's certainly very attractive to women and who had a very ingratiating manner and was able to charm his way, not just amongst the circles of the Polish intelligence services, but really wherever he went.

It was Sosnowski's reputation with women that first brought him to the attention of the Second Department. It is said that he had some sort of involvement with a woman who was also involved in the Polish intelligence services. And the rumor was that she died a violent death because she was willing to betray that intelligence service. Watching a former lover die at the hands of your prospective employer hardly seems like the best advertisement.

But Sosnovsky had his reasons for pursuing his own life in espionage. It does appear that Sosnovsky was a heavy spender. He had very expensive tastes, not just to impress his lovers. And of course he got into debt, and this was one reason why he was basically willing to sell his services to intelligence services, because he knew he could have been a very successful asset in Germany, and he was willing to take some risks to infiltrate German circles.

Sosnovsky was recruited to the Second Department in 1926. Immediately, his masters began hatching plans for how best to deploy this charismatic young asset. What the Second Department needed were actuals.

accurate sources of information, a reliable source of information inside Berlin. They needed people who were connected to the high command and to senior military circles in Berlin to fathom not just the resources of the Germany that was then recovering from the trauma of the First World War, but also the intentions and ambitions. What sort of mindset you were dealing with there was very important. What sort of risks, for example, the Germans were willing to take to get back control over these disputed territories.

Sosnovsky was deemed the perfect candidate to ingratiate himself with high society and gain some insight into the mentality of the upper echelons of Berlin. The plan was to use his skills as an expert with horses. He was very knowledgeable, having served in the German or Austro-Hungarian cavalry. He was

He was very knowledgeable on the question matters and he was willing to put forward a plan and carry out a plan to breed horses in Berlin. That would bring him into contact with cavalry officers in Berlin and he also wanted to and had a way of getting access to German races which were very popular in Berlin after the First World War and were seen as a way for people to meet and mix with high society.

And so, in 1928, Sosnowski moved to Berlin under an assumed identity, that of a Polish baron called Ritter von Nauletsch. His work quickly began to bear fruit.

His initial reports were full of quite useful information. And of course, this came at a very high price because of his expenses, which were, of course, high in that line of work, but some considerable price he was supplying information. In Berlin, Sosnovsky used his charm to build a network of high-value assets within the German military community.

One of these assets, above all, was considered a prize catch. He struck up a relationship with Benita von Falkenhayn, who was an aristocrat who had been married previously into high-level German military circles. Baroness Benita von Falkenhayn had married into the family of one of the highest-ranking chiefs in the German Imperial Army. She still moved in those circles.

Her seduction and ultimate recruitment by Sosnovsky opened a channel to some of the closest guarded secrets of the military. And Sosnovsky was adding recruits to his spy ring all the time. He happily reported to his seniors that he had made the intimate acquaintance of two separate women in the headquarters of the German military.

And through them, he was acquiring a steady flow of critical intelligence. Much of it related to Germany's plans on the Polish border. But all of this intelligence came with a hefty price tag.

And so scarce were other sources of information, almost none of it could be corroborated. The problem with this sort of intelligence that he was supplying, and this is so true of espionage generally, is it's very, very difficult to verify. And of course, somebody can make all sorts of outrageous claims, and you're ultimately left in some cases with an almost gut feeling about what might be right and what might not be, and what's exaggerated and what isn't, and what has substance and what doesn't.

At a certain point, Sosnovsky's masters back in Warsaw began to have their doubts about their star agent.

If it seems too good to be true, well, perhaps it is. The information that Sosnowski started to provide his Polish counterparts and officials with became increasingly low-grade. It became very banal. And the officials in Poland, in the Second Department, were increasingly suspicious about the so-called intelligence that he was providing. And doubts started to emerge quite soon about who this person was and what he claimed to be.

Sosnowski had always presented himself as a man of the highest breeding. He liked to portray himself as something that was an aristocrat, and he seems to have got away with this rather well. But actually, the evidence is that he had a very humble background in what is now Poland.

And of course his military record again may have been very different from the one he portrayed and there's no evidence he did actually see anything like the amount of military action that he did like people to think he had seen. And this is very much part of the facade and the image that helped or appears to have helped him to sell himself, not just to an awful lot of admiring women, but also to his spymasters in Poland. Soon enough, questions were even raised about Sovznovsky's star asset, the well-connected Baroness von Falkenhayn,

He did get some access to the sort of things that she would have known during her marriage. But how reliable she was at the time Zosnoski knew her remains unclear because there is evidence that she was a double agent and she was playing games, probably also for financial gain as well. Because again, it was very easy for anyone in those days to fall on hard times, which it appears that she had done.

But while the intelligence offered may have been invented, the risks attached to this line of work were all too real. If you get caught as a spy, see the penalties would be draconian. And you're dealing with a very clever and very ruthless regime that would have thought nothing of executing people who were guilty of treason. Sosnovsky was always walking a tightrope.

In 1933, his activities caught the attention of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and he was subsequently arrested by Hitler's Gestapo in 1934. After his arrest, his entire ring collapsed. -Binita von Falkenhayn, she was discovered to have been a double agent. She did pay the ultimate price for playing these sort of games. She was beheaded by the Gestapo in 1936.

As for Sosnowski himself, he was lucky. After being held for 14 months, he was traded for three German spies caught in Poland. Upon his return, he was put on trial for fraud and high treason and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The general consensus is that Sosnowski was a charlatan who was basically ripping off the Polish taxpayer. After the outbreak of World War II,

It becomes harder to track Sosnowski. Some say he was shot and killed by prison guards not long after the invasion of Poland. Others say he survived his shooting and was recruited by the Soviet Union's secret police, where he rose to the rank of colonel and taught others the art of spycraft. All accounts agree that he did not survive the war. And so Sosnowski's life ended in the same murky obscurity in which it began.

His story is both spectacular and typical. He was an opportunist, born of turbulent times, a living embodiment of the desperate scramble for information as the Nazis consolidated power and prepared for war. And while Poland may have been early into the dogfight, they were not the only nation hunting for answers in the turbulence. For Great Britain, in the aftermath of World War I,

Germany was just one item on a long list of competing concerns. Great Britain in the 1930s was, like any country, concerned with reconciling its national security with keeping costs down. You have a background of economic depression and the trauma after the First World War when resources are so scarce. At the same time, you have to keep your country safe, not just from European threats, but also across the empire. British strategists had to

keep their eye on so many different fronts and so many different prospective threats ranging from Japan, China and the Soviet Union straight through to threats that seem to be emanating from the continent and that much closer to the British mainland and that was most obviously Germany. But just how pressing a concern was Germany? In the country's leadership, opinion was split. This was, after all, an issue on the continent and Britain had already overextended itself in the Great War.

But as Hitler's Reich grew increasingly bold, the situation became difficult to ignore.

It became clear to some people, most obviously Winston Churchill, that there was a real sense of danger emanating from Germany, from Nazi Germany. And it was necessary to keep a finger tightly on the pulse of German opinion and German developments to find out what sort of threat might emerge over the next few years. Another of those figures deeply concerned by reports from the Third Reich was one Robert Wanzertat.

Robert van Sittard was a pretty formidable personality. He was a very able and well-connected individual who'd acquired senior positions in the Foreign Office during the First World War and thereafter. He became particularly important in 1929 when he took up post as an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. And relatively early on, like Churchill, he started to see Nazi Germany as a real threat to British interests.

He obviously lived through the First World War and he was deeply alarmed from right about the mid-1920s onwards by the rise of fascism. And he was deeply concerned, not just about this threat, but about this relative inability, he thought, perceived inability of the British intelligence services and the wider establishment to keep a close eye on this rapidly growing threat. Van Zetart could see how dangerously thin British intelligence services were spread.

In their lack of resources, he saw a disaster waiting to happen. Working within the Foreign Office, he was obviously very well positioned to see how poorly funded the British intelligence services were. And he was aware that the number of personnel and the resources they had simply weren't keeping pace with the threat, obviously threat, of Germany. It was those perceived shortcomings of the secret intelligence service that caused van Sittard to act.

But he could not do so alone. His collaborator, in all that would come next, was a man called Sir Claude Dancy.

Dancy was a British army officer who'd had a pretty good war record in the First World War and served in all sorts of far-flung and rather wild parts of the British Empire. He was something of an adventurer. Dancy was based in Rome, the head of the British intelligence station there, and Francis Arkes approached him and made some suggestions about setting up an independent intelligence service that would work quite independently of the SIS.

The idea was that Van Sittard and Dancy would take matters into their own hands and fund an independent spy agency, one unhindered by shrinking budgets and scattered focus. Unlike SIS, its efforts would be laser-pointed on Nazi Germany. Van Sittard's private detective agency became known.

It was funded partly by him, he was a very affluent individual, but partly by a number of sympathizers who shared his perspective. What he also relied upon was the goodwill of people who sympathized as well with his position and his views, and who were also in a position to actually get information about what was happening inside Germany and who were willing to do that free of charge as a kind of freebie to their country.

So what you're doing in that situation is you're making contact with an intelligence officer like Dancy was. You're getting in contact with people who have legitimate reason to visit the Third Reich. Businessmen, journalists, tourists. Anyone who had cause to visit Germany could be a valuable source. These amateur agents might not have been trained in spycraft,

But their insights could make a difference. They were in a position to get some sort of feel about what was happening inside Germany, maybe get some idea of what was happening inside perhaps factories, and perhaps more importantly to gauge things like public opinion inside Germany, which is still very important, even Germany causes a dictatorship. For a time, Wancetart's private detective agency produced a steady stream of intelligence.

But the organisation was rocked in 1936 by a diplomatic scandal involving Dancy. Dancy was head of British intelligence at the British embassy in Rome and he took everyone by surprise by resigning very suddenly from his position. And there were a lot of rumours about financial irregularity, quote unquote. In other words, Dancy appeared to have been caught cooking secret intelligence service books.

his good reputation was ruined. Or, at least, that's how things seemed from the outside. What actually happened with Dancy was that these false rumors of financial irregularities were spun in order to deceive any people who might be listening, notably any German agents who might pick up what was happening inside British intelligence and to deflect from the truth. And what truth might that be?

The truth was that Dancy had been headhunted to set up this independent organisation called the Z Organisation and the British intelligence officials, Admiral Sinclair, were desperate to keep this hidden from the Germans and they would rather paint this picture of Dancy being sacked than let the Germans get any sense that something like Z Organisation or any independent intelligence gathering organisation was being established.

Like Vansittart's detective agency, Z-Organization was designed to operate away from governmental oversight. But its remit was to be much more ambitious.

The idea behind Z-Organisation was to create, again, an entirely independent intelligence gathering organisation focused specifically on Germany. But the point about Z-Organisation was that because it was so independent, it meant that if British intelligence was infiltrated, as it had been at any point in Germany or in any surrounding country, the Germans would still not be able to infiltrate Z-Organisation.

In Nazi Germany, the prospect of detection and swift draconian punishment always loomed large in any spy's mind. Z-Organisation sought to insulate its assets from that threat by any means possible. So what you have is a situation in which Z-Organisation had a separate budget and with one exception, which was Admiral Sinclair, it had separate personnel. It had its own chain of command.

different codes and code words and code names and used different safe houses throughout Germany and beyond and it gave a great deal of guarantee about the ability to function in Germany with relative impunity. I say relative because no one was safe but it was a relatively watertight organization that had its own independent function and existence.

Dancy's Zed organisation found recruits in the unlikeliest of disciplines. You had individuals who, for example, ran film production companies and they had legitimate reason to visit Germany and they had a visa to do that to determine and find filming locations and locations.

They could make all sorts of trips that perhaps weren't quite as necessary as they should have been. Looking for hidden military sites. And there were art dealing businesses that had a lot of customers in various parts of Germany and would go on various undercover fact-finding trips to the Reich. So you had a great many different types of people.

And what probably united them was probably just patriotism as well as a rather romantic type of person who was rather drawn to the sort of cloak and dagger stuff that one reads about in the newspapers. Even more than financial reward, it was this notion of romance that Zed organisation could offer its agents on the ground. The heroic idea of doing one's part to avert a looming crisis.

I think some people were rather seduced by the famous images that emerged after the First World War of people like Lord Baden-Powell, who prior to the First World War had actually toured Germany and had sketched landscapes that happened to be pretty close to hidden airfields, various other military sites. And this is an image that rather stuck in some people's minds when probably they got involved in things like said organization.

So you have people who might have gone on cycling holidays and cycled again a little bit closer to airfields than perhaps they could have done or should have done. And people who, for example, in one case joined a golfing expedition and mixed very closely with other German golf players and wanted to get an idea of what sort of things were going through their minds, what sort of attitudes they had to Hitler, to the Reich, to Britain.

and to the prospect of war. And it was this sense of undertaking such things that a lot of people probably would have been rather seduced by. And yet, for all of the romance that Dancy and his Zed organisation offered...

There's a reason that this story hasn't entered the ranks of espionage legends or been immortalized by endless retellings. Well, the truth is that though, again, the image is rather lovely, the fact is that Dancy after the war was...

Private intelligence agencies like these saw independence as their greatest asset in the Cold War against Hitler. But in the end, it was also their downfall.

The problem with this sort of situation is that it easily conflates accurate intelligence on the one hand with rumour or opinion on the other. What you're doing when you go to any country, you hear lots and lots of rumours back and ham to anyone. And because deep down somebody wants to get involved with an intelligence service, they want to perhaps do their bit for their country, they want to contribute to a cause, they very easily exaggerate the importance or substance of those empty rumours.

Established intelligence agencies understood how to distinguish the whispers of truth from the din of rumor and speculation.

Private agencies? Not so much. So a trained intelligence officer would be able to sort all those different rumors out, paint a big picture comprised of all these different reports, and then work out using his or her professional judgment about what is worth pursuing and listening to and what isn't. The problem with Van Sittard's approach was that you have these visitors, businessmen and journalists and tourists in some cases going to the Third Reich or whatever,

and they're picking up on these rumours, these empty stories or accusations or whatever, are getting traction and in some cases going to a very high level within government when they don't deserve to. And this is the danger for every individual who tries to take things into their own hands. It's got to go through the proper channels. Otherwise, far from clarifying an uncertain picture, faulty information simply adds to the noise.

Once again, the story of Z-Organisation illustrates the scale of the challenge external forces faced in building an accurate projection of Hitler's intentions. To actually get really accurate information requires very much higher level infiltration of the Reich. And of course, that's very different from what Z-Organisation actually achieved. And so, to our final parable.

This one, a genuine effort to infiltrate the highest ranks of Hitler's Reich. And it comes from an unlikely source. If Great Britain was slow off the mark in the post-war intelligence scramble, then the United States was near paralyzed.

Well, the United States after the First World War was in a state of shock. It was recovering from the losses, material losses, as well as the losses of life. And of course, there's very strong isolationist sentiment in the United States. There's great reluctance to sacrifice more American lives for what perceived as rather unnecessary and geographically distant wars.

And you couple that with the Great Depression and the fact that there are more important things at the time to actually get involved with. So you have this very strong isolationist sentiment. The fact is that the Senate at this time in the 1930s hadn't even ratified the Treaty of Versailles, such was the isolationist sentiment. And yet it was exactly this determined neutrality that afforded America a unique opportunity.

An opportunity embodied by one Truman Smith. Truman Smith was an American soldier who'd served in Germany during the First World War. He was also a fluent German speaker. And as somebody with a military background who spent time in Germany after 1917, who was well qualified to work for the American Diplomatic Service, he joined the American Embassy in Berlin in 1922 as an assistant army attache.

And at that time, he was tasked, amongst other things, with traveling through Bavaria to get a better idea of Hitler, who was just starting to emerge at this time, and Hitler's National Socialist Party. He was also tasked with keeping tabs on German rearmament, covert rearmament after the First World War, and he was liaising with international inspectors who were keeping or trying to keep a close eye on these covert efforts by the Germans to rearm their country.

After his early diplomatic posting during the years of the Weimar Republic, Smith was recalled from Berlin.

But in 1935, he was once again dispatched to Germany. This time, with the explicit intention of learning about Hitler's Reich. His task at that time was to build up a more general picture about what's happening inside Germany and to work out exactly how strong the German military was and let Washington know about what that perceived strength actually was. And on this front...

America's committed neutrality would prove an advantage. Smith would be treated not as an enemy of Nazi Germany, but as a potential friend.

Smith was warmly welcomed by the senior leaders of the Third Reich and he got to know a great many of them very well on a personal level. He, for example, became very familiar with Goering and his family and knew them very well. He knew other senior figures in the Luftwaffe, notably Erhard Milch, who was effectively Goering's deputy, as well as top pilots like Ernst Judett, who was somebody he got to know again extremely well.

By ingratiating himself with some of the most powerful figures in the Reich, Smith managed to succeed where so many others had failed. He was able to see the Nazi party up close and unguarded. This gave him a very good idea of the kind of attitudes

and mindset of the people who were helping to draw up policy. It gave them an idea of the kind of human face behind their media image. He recognized their flaws, for example, Goring's notorious taste for fine foods and fine living, his indolence and possibly his drug-taking. So it gave him an insight into the kind of people that he was dealing with and who America and the Allies would be dealing with after 1939, which may have borne some fruit later on.

Truman Smith sought to exploit his friendly relations with the Nazi Party wherever he could. And in 1936, he would make his single most impactful contribution to the pre-war intelligence landscape. He did so by inviting Charles Lindbergh to visit Germany.

Charles Lindbergh was arguably the most famous man in the United States and probably one of the most famous people in the world. The reason is that when he was just 25, he'd made the first nonstop flight from America to Europe.

He had left New York and arrived in Paris 33 hours later. He was held as a great figure and he, for that reason, was somebody who was going to be in a position to hopefully influence the Germans or at least impress the Germans. And that was the reason why Smith had invited him to Germany. Smith knew that the Nazi party would roll out the red carpet for an international star like Lindbergh.

they would want to show him the German air force in all its might. Smith invited Lindbergh to Germany initially for a 10-day trip and that's in July 1936. Smith worked hard to get various invites for him. Lindbergh was treated with a great many aerial displays by all sorts of different planes that the Germans wanted to show off. He was given pretty well unrestricted access to numerous factories.

And Lindbergh met a great many top pilots, top officials, scientific experts, some of whom were working at research facilities that were relatively unknown at the time, or completely unknown. And the 10-day trip was held as a great success, and Lindbergh seized a great deal of attention inside Germany and beyond at the time. But behind the photo opportunities, each demonstration would present an invaluable intelligence opportunity for Smith and his new recruit.

Smith probably seems to have felt that Lindbergh was somebody who had technical knowledge of aeroplanes and was in a position to judge what sort of capabilities the Germans had in the air. At the end of Lindbergh's tour of the Reich, the two Americans compiled their findings in an exhaustive dossier.

Smith and Lindbergh worked together on a very detailed intelligence report, what they call the General Air Estimate. Smith sent it back to his departmental bosses in Washington. That's the G2 intelligence service. What the two men had argued and pointed to in this report was that the Germans were making huge strides

in rearming. The Luftwaffe in particular would soon surpass the RAF in the quality and quantity of its planes. They judged that the Germans already had 10,000 warplanes and they were producing more warplanes at a most incredible rate, somewhere between 500 and 800 planes a month. So this extraordinary rate of production. This report, very alarming report, went straight back to Washington. The picture painted by Smith and Lindbergh's report

could hardly have been more dramatic. It told of an immensely powerful nation ready to strike at any moment.

His report, as Smith intended it to, did get a great deal of attention in Washington, in G2 and beyond. It appears to have gone to the presidential office. It appears to have been brought to the attention of Roosevelt. The highly alarming dossier ricocheted through the international intelligence community, striking terror in the hearts of all who came across it. Smith's report was a great success.

would have been passed on to, again, the British and the French, both in Washington, but also in Berlin by Smith himself. And this helped to reinforce these fears of just how strong the Germans were. There was just one problem. The problem was that their reports were completely wrong.

Neither man were trained intelligence experts and what they were doing was using a very superficial way of calculating these very alarming figures, almost unbelievable figures. One reason for this is because if you're going to judge an air force and it's the kind of threat it poses, you have to weigh up things like not just the number of planes, but also the quality, the armaments.

the training of the personnel, the backup. And of course, even in narrow numerical terms, it's extraordinarily difficult to get an accurate figure, the kind of accurate figure they were coming out with. I mean, between 500 and 800 planes per month is not only a very wide margin, but it was wildly off what the Germans were actually capable of doing. It was nothing remotely like that. So both men had actually reached completely erroneous conclusions that did

All of which played directly into the hands of the Reich, because unbeknownst to Smith, policy in Nazi Germany had shifted in the mid-1930s.

Up to 1935, the Germans had deliberately concealed their attempts to rearm. That was because they were afraid of retaliation and possibly even invasion by particularly the French. And at that time, obviously, they were vulnerable. They didn't have the strength to fight back. After 1935, there's a sudden shift of emphasis. Suddenly, the Germans are strong enough to fight back. Suddenly, they're in a position to stand up for themselves.

And their emphasis then is on impressing and intimidating the outside world with their perceived military strength. It's at almost this exact moment that Smith arrives in Berlin and is invited to evaluate for himself the capabilities of the German military. He believes he is the cunning spy, winning valuable intelligence with charm and charisma. In reality, he's a mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda.

He wasn't a trained intelligence expert at all. He was an army man. He had no intelligence training that we know of. And that may be one reason why he seems to be relatively seduced by the kind of propaganda that the Nazi high command is effectively throwing at him.

So he received numerous invites to, for example, watch military displays, visit airfields and visit various high-level factories. But this wasn't really intelligence in the proper sense of the word. What he was effectively doing was witnessing stage shows that were designed to impress and intimidate everyone who watched, but particularly foreign visitors and particularly people who had strong links to intelligence services. What the Germans are trying to do at this stage is to convey an aura of invincibility

The consequences of this subterfuge would be nothing short of monumental. In the Munich crisis of 1938, Adolf Hitler threatened to start a war if Germany was not given a valuable section of Czechoslovakia. Reports like Smith's weighed heavily in the minds of the leaders who might have been able to stop him.

So you had a situation in September 1938 of the Munich crisis when Chamberlain and his French counterpart

went to negotiate with Hitler and failed to put up enough of a fight and be insistent enough towards Hitler and gave too much away. That was partly because you have reports, very alarming reports like this that have been put forward by Smith that have painted this terrifying picture of the kind of damage that the Germans were capable of inflicting on the outside world, specifically on Britain and France in the event of war.

So Smith's report played its own part, possibly a very significant part, in creating this false impression about German strength. And so Smith's report, like many other stories from this era, represents an impactful failure of intelligence, one with disastrous consequences. Hearing this story, and others like it, it's tempting to imagine some parallel history.

one in which intelligence efforts were coherent and aligned, one in which Hitler's ambitions and his deceptions were understood sooner, one in which the great existential threat of the 20th century was headed off at the pass, eliminated without the need for the devastation of war. Tempting, indeed. But according to Roger Howard, such magical thinking is a red herring.

My personal feeling is that the real problem was not the intelligence that was coming through. It was the willingness of politicians and people who actually pulled the strings of power to actually get involved with Germany and take a more decisive line. As the old expression goes, hindsight is 20-20, but you cannot change the past.

I think so soon after the First World War and in such a difficult economic climate, I think there was such a general reluctance to engage with this rapidly growing enemy that it wouldn't really have made any difference if even more alarming, more accurate and more consistent and coherent intelligence efforts had been made. I think it was just really what people see, it's true with all of us, we see what we want to see. It's only with hindsight that we can see how wrong things were or how differently things could have been.

If there's a lesson to be taken from the Cold War against the Reich, perhaps it's not what might have gone differently, so much as what may still happen again.

Another important lesson of the book would be the, I suppose, the relative ease with which any intelligence service can be seduced by people claiming to be what they're not, by these charlatans. And this is particularly true when you're confronted by an opaque enemy like Nazi Germany or indeed like China today.

You're dealing with enemies that reveal very little and have a facade that's very difficult to penetrate. And in that situation, when you're desperate for intelligence, I think any intelligence service, no matter how good they are, can be very easily seduced by people who pretend to be what they're not.

A very obvious example from relatively recent history would be the run-up to the Iraq War, 2003, when you had intelligence experts, highly trained and very experienced intelligence experts in Britain, in America and Germany particularly, who were led astray by people like this agent Khovbor, who became notorious as a defector from Saddam Hussein's regime. And he became notorious because he made false claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

And they were instrumental in taking us to a war that, with hindsight, didn't need to be fought at all. So this is really important. I think it's very easy to think, oh, it's never going to happen again. But it has happened and it will keep on happening. I'm Rhiannon Needs. If you'd like to learn more about Roger's research, pick up his book, Spying on the Reich, The Cold War Against Hitler. It's published by the Oxford University Press.

And join us next time for another top secret excursion with true spies. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a friend?

So many of my turning points, whether it's about Hunter, Gather, national security or ethics, hinge on, to some degree, 9-11. I mean, it is partially the attack, but it's also the reaction to it. The immediate aftermath, you saw so much debate about this issue. You know, how far do we go? What are we doing? How do we do it? What's going to be the long-term consequence and perception of doing it that way?

All of those things were in constant debate. I'm not saying that I agreed or anyone agreed with every decision that was made. I don't think that's possible. But look, we didn't have a blueprint. True Spies, The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.