The spider and its flies

Maurice Buckm aster

The Nazi Secret Service Andre Brissaud (Bodley Head £3.00) KGB John Barron (Hodder and Stoughton £4.25) Milton Waldman's translation of Andre Brissaud's fascinating history of the Secret Service of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst admirably reflects the author's attempt to present in understandable form what he himself describes as "probably the most complex activity of the Second World War."

To the generation which then had military or para-military activity in the Allied camp, the initials SS (Schutzstaffel) had a grim and sinister ring, even if the full extent of the power exercised by this organisation was veiled in a certain degree of mystery. With the ending of the Nuremberg trials, the "Absolute Evil" of former SS men and ex-members of the SD was largely forgotten, even though some of these thugs (I use the word advisedly) still feel bound by the oath of secrecy given to Hitler. Andre Brissaud does a service to the younger generations and to mankind in general in revealing, in an almost breezy manner, the results of his profound researches into the history, policy and methods of the most feared of German forces. For it must be made quite plain that the SS, under their leader Heinrich Himmler, had unfettered power, which they used without material or moral restraint and with complete disregard for the conventional ethics of civilised humanity. This black-uniformed elite, the Fiihrer's special guard, displayed total indifference to the Army chiefs' views if they differed from their own. They considered themselves "the best people" and deemed that they therefore had the right, and the duty, to impose their will, regardless of the rights, and indeed the lives, of others.

Already in 1931 the SS was becoming the focus of the young elite of national socialism. They believed themselves to be, in the words of Himmler, "a police of the mind, the instrument for measuring and controlling thought." In those days one of the driving forces of the organisation was ReinhardHeydrich, whose intellectual ability and ambition were only matched by his unrelenting and sadistic brutality. His overwhelming influence was paremount until his assassination on June 4, 1942, by the Czech parachutists sent from London.

If Heydrich set the tone of the SS, he was but endorsing the policy of Himmler, for whom the workings of Hitler's deranged mind provided a cover to be interpreted as he wished. Heydrich was well served. He had in the early years recruited both Walter Schellenberg and Alfred Naujocks, who vied with each other in carrying out the repressive measures ordered by their master.

There was little official — and no unofficial — resistance. Admiral Canaris, who took charge of the Abwehr at the age of forty-seven in 1934, was warned by his predecessor, Captain Patzig, of the strained relations between the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence) and the SS. As Andre Brissaud writes in his book Canaris, the Admiral was confident that he could outsmart Heydrich and even achieve a modus vivendi with the SS. By guile and stratagem he very nearly succeeded, but finally the Gestapo became convinced of his guilt and he was hanged for treason at FlOssenburg Concentration Camp, that "symbol of Heinrich Himmler's political empire."

"The SS," said Himmler, "is the ideological information service of the Party and the State."

Its agents set to work to uncover the slightest ideological irregularity by a clinical scrutiny of the nation over which they had clandestinely established tyrannical power. They stopped at nothing to achieve their objectives and their own personal advancement. Watergate appears innocent, almost beneficent, in comparison. Even the instruments used by the SS for their nefarious practices — micro-photography, advanced wireless network, coding, poison pills, were in advance of their time. Moral pressure brought to bear on barmen, sleeping car attendants, air-crews and hotel staff, proved intolerable and in many cases led to suicide. Heydrich was conducting his own war, roughly but by no means always, in parallel with the war being Waged by the Wehrmacht. "Assassination, blackmail and terror were his, arms."

The Nazi Secret Service is extremely well documented.. If one is tempted to express a certain distrust of the passages in °ratio directa, where the conversationalists recorded nothing and are all dead, the general atmosphere is convincing. One has the feeling that every possible means of research and crosschecking has been used. Andre Brissaud, one feels, was entitled to the prodigious stroke of luck, which enabled him, as a result of a purely fortuitous car breakdown in Northern Italy, to meet, in the house to which he had repaired for shelter, none other than Walter Schellenberg, whom he had long been seeking. Moreover a Schellenberg who was prepared to talk, perhaps in a mood to give confidences because he realised that he had only a few weeks to live.

John Barron's book KGB, the Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, is a more serious work, more serious because it deals with events which are still happening and which threaten our entire democratic system of life. If the duty of an author is to research the facts, analyse them and present them in a form which alerts the reader to the unimagined dangers which threaten his continued way of living, John Barron's book on the KGB succeeds in discharging this duty in a spine-chilling manner and with remarkable clarity.

It is important that the Western world — and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the under-developed countries — should realise the ever-present threat posed by the inflexible policies of a determined body which immediately controls the destiny and the day-to-day existence of 250 million people, and which closely affects the future of perhaps 300 million more in countries outside the USSR, either satellites or those which are too weak to resist overwhelming military, and nuclear power. These policies, dictated by the Politburo, are executed without any restraint by the Storm Troops of the USSR, the KGB, who number, at a conservative estimate, a least half a million, including ninety thousand staff officers, but excluding the hundreds of thousands of informants and spies which it employs.

In an excellent preface by Robert Conquest, the aims of the KGB are summed up thus:

It is in principle engaged in a permanent struggle not only with the rest of the world, but also with its own population.... It is, in fact, a police state....The basic principle . . . is the suppression of all but the most orthodox views and aspirations among the Russians themselves, and among their subject nations.... The element of coercion and repression is the major pillar of the state.... The long-term aim is to extirpate our (system). ... For our immediate defence ... a vigilant and well-informed citizenry is necessary.

The Western democracies are amazingly

apathetic in the face of this threat. Relying upon the principle that there should be cony plete freedom of thought and expression for all however extreme, they assume that others will be as respectful of these rights as themselves. That is certainly not the case with the rulers ef the USSR. They do not even pretend that it is, except where self-interest dictates a policy Of outward acceptance. In fact, the outspokenness of the KGB's policy-makers is brazen. The desire for detente and its consequent advantages for their economic difficulties is subordinated to the overall objective of overthrowing by any and every means, the democratic principles which govern about one third of the world's inhabitants. John Barron examines several of these means and quotes examples in considerable detail for each of them.

One of the most interesting parallels between the Nazi SS and the Russian KGB, as is seen in these two books, is the sadistic' disregard for human life which the members of each organisation display. It is, of course, paralleled by the attitude of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the Japanese Red Army and other such extremist groupings, and, many would add, the Provos and the wild men on both sides in Northern Ireland. Wanton brutality is the hallmark of promotion in these services. In both Nazi Germany and now in USSR diplomacy is merely a cover for deception and, wherever possible, armed might. The KGB thinks of itself as the "Sword and Shield of the Party." Certainly the 'sword' is more in evidence that the 'shield.' It enjoys resources for aggression, authority and naked power never hitherto concentrated in a single organisation. If Soviet ambitions abroad meet with set-backs — as in the Middle East — the range and tempo of. KGB operations are increased. If unrest threatens on the domestic front, repression of the people is stepped up.

A fascinating chapter in John Barron's book describes in detail and with factual examples the methods adopted by the KGB to keep tabs on visitors, from abroad. These manoeuvres range from attempting to recruit them as agents in their home countries (by a mixture of blackmail and duplicity) to causing them to be accused of a petty offence, for which the punishment may be detention and even hard labour, with its almost inevitable fatal consequences. Any businessman, indeed any tourist, visiting the USSR should read this book. In so doing he may learn at least how to minimise the dangers and what steps remain open to him to thwart them, The diplomatic community in Moscow is in a state of perpetual siege. As Anatoli Kuznetsov, the famous Russian author, observed: Everybody knows that the number of people murdered by the secret police runs into many millions. But when we come to reckon the number of people who are terrorised and deformed by them, then we have to include the whole population of the Soviet Union.

But it is by no means only in the USSR itself that the KGB wields power. Since late in the 'sixties the Politburo appreciates that uncontrolled terrorism can assist the Soviet objective of undermining foreign countries. Hence the shipments of arms to the IRA Provisionals, to Libya, to Syria, and, who knows, to extremists in many Western democracies. Their objective is to "support all revolutionary forces of our time." Their means — men and women dedicated to the overthrow of any regime which offends against the doctrines enunciated by the small group of tyrants in the Politburo.

Lest any should think that the menace will grow less by the tentative move towards 'detente,' Brezhnev asserted (for domestic consumption) in June 1972: "We should be prepared for an intensification of the struggle."

I hope we are.

Colonel Buchmaster was in charge of the French section of SOE (Special Operations Executive) during the war,