Allen Dulles kept two things he knew from the Warren
Commission that could have changed the nature of their work as well as their
conclusion that the President was killed by a lone assassin and not the result
of a conspiracy. The first was Dulles’ knowledge of the CIA
plots to kill Cuba
If Ruth Paine was treated in the same fashion as the
landlady of Lincoln
It wasn’t until after Allen Dulles died that, with the
assistance of many of her wartime OSS reports, Mary Bancroft wrote her book
documenting her relationships with her stepfather – Clarence W. Barron aka
“CW,” the founding publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Ruth Forbes Paine
(Michael’s mom), OSS agent and CIA boss Allen
Dulles, the reluctant Nazi Hans B. Insidious and her role in the Valkyrie Plot
– the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler.
Although she opens with book as a young girl in 1919 holding
her father’s hand while watching a parade march down Fifth
Avenue New York City
It was C.W. who also always told her to “Write it up,…but
remember that the facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth
my lie!”
She also notes that CW expressed foreknowledge of the death
of President Harding, suggesting that it wasn’t such an accidental death after
all.
“I was present myself on one occasion when CW’s ‘nose’ was
at work. We were playing bridge at his home in Cohasset. CW was an excellent
bridge player, but on this particular evening he revoked several times and,
finally flinging down his cards, said he couldn’t continue. Important news was
about to break. Every ten minutes or so he sent one of his secretaries to phone
the office to see what was coming in over the wires. For over an hour the
secretary would report that there was nothing. Finally he returned to say there
was still nothing – except that President Warren G. Harding, on a visit to California Vermont
Her first husband, Sherwin Badger, a Harvard grad, worked at
first for United Fruit in Cuba
As for Bancroft’s relationship with Michael Paine’s mother,
she wrote (p. 54):
“Two of our Boston New York West Side apartment.
We met a lot of their friends, mostly in the arts. Ruth was a painter. Lyman,
an architect, was interested in what he termed ‘the ultimate reality,’ which I
interpreted as my old friend, Truth. Lyman and I had endless discussions about
this ultimate reality while sipping highballs of bathtub gin and ginger ale
that would have taken the varnish off a table if they had happened to spill.
Usually one of the guests played the piano while others argued or danced. Some
couples occasionally disappeared for protracted periods of time.”
“Those were the days of Judge Ben Landsey of Colorado
“In the meantime, among the people we had met at the Paines’
parties were Marya Mannes, a talented writer, and her brother Leopold, a pianist
and composer then working with Leopold Godowsky on a process of color
photography that eventually became known as Kodachrome. Leopold’s wife, Edie,
was also a painter. Through them we met Marya and Leopold’s parents. Clara
Mannes, a formidable lady and fine painter, was the sister of Walter Damrosch,
for many years conductor of the New York Philharmonic. David Mannes, an
excellent violinist, was at the time conducting free concerts at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Together they ran the Mannes
School
“Toward the end of the summer of 1930 I went up to spend a
few days with Ruth Paine at her family’s summer home on Naushon Island off the
coast of Massachusetts. One afternoon we sailed over to see Leopold and Edie
Mannes at their home on Martha’s Vineyard …I never really
lost touch with Leopold until his death at a comparatively early age. By then
he had completed the invention of Kodachrome and paid off his backers. His last
years were consumed largely by the problems of his family’s music school and by
the obligations of his second marriage to a women of whom his mother thoroughly
approved.”
“Although my relationship with Leopold had not worked out as
I had hoped, my marriage to Sherwin was defiantly over. I got a divorce in Reno France
“Early in July we sailed on one of the ships of the French
Line bound for Bordeaux
It was on this cruise that Bancroft met her future husband
Jean Rufenacht, a French-Swiss businessman based in Zurich
“Ever since the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, and the subsequent Enabling Act of March 23, giving the German government complete freedom of action without regard to parliamentary or constitutional limitations, the Swiss had watched with growing apprehension the antics of their powerful northern neighbor. What was happening in Germany was a constant preoccupation of everyone we met…During the night of June 30, 1934 – known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ – the Nazis murdered several hundred people, including former Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, and also Hitler’s close personal friend Ernst Roehm, head of the SA, the notorious Nazi storm troops…”
“On the eve of their departure, King Alexander of Yugoslavia
and Louis Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, were assassinated in
Marsilles…I was amazed there was no mention of the assassination of King
Alexander and Barthou in the local press…The way everyone we met – and we met a
great many people from all walks of life – had apparently obliterated from
their consciousness anything that might have touched on unpleasant reality
convinced me that the Germans who later claimed they knew nothing about the
concentration camps were not necessarily lying. The real reason they had not
known what was happening was quite simply that they hadn’t wanted to know.”
“It was certainly lucky that I had developed a much more
sophisticated point of view, without losing sight of the basic moral values and
ideals I had been raised to believe in, by the time Allen Dulles crossed the
Swiss frontier and enlisted my services in his wartime intelligence activities.
For if there was one thing my work during the war convinced me of, it was
essential to have a very clear-cut idea of your own moral values, so that if
you were forced by necessity to break them, you were fully conscious of what
you were doing and why.”
“I realized quite early in my work for the Office of
Strategic Services that I must never have any dealings with an enemy of
whatever nationality whom I could not imagine liking as an individual if there
had not been a war on. If I didn’t like a contact, it might mean, at least in
my case, that my judgment of the information I was receiving might be clouded
by my personal dislike of the person providing it. An example of this was when
a deserter from the German Army, a nasty little man with shifty eyes and a
sleazy manner, showed up one day at our apartment with the maps of a dozen
German airfield that he wanted to sell to the Americans. My distaste for him
was such that I didn’t feel able to evaluate objectively either the plans or
his motive in trying to sell them to me. Yet, realizing the value of the maps
if authentic, I told him I had no idea about such things and gave him the name
of an OSS
“The first thing I did after our return from Germany Yugoslavia Yugoslavia Germany
In Switzerland
“In 1936 Jung had published an article entitled ‘Wotan,’
which had caused a great deal of controversy. But I felt that his thesis,
namely that the archetypes of the old, primitive, Teutonic gods had broken
loose and were affecting the behavior of the entire German nation, was valid.
In other words, a whole country had been seized by madness in very much the
same way an individual goes insane. This seemed to me then - and still seems to
me today – the only possible explanation of such an otherwise incomprehensible
and tragic phenomenon.”
“On Tuesday evening, September 27, there was a blackout in Switzerland BCC ,
said in a tired voice that things looked hopeless, although he found it
inconceivable that Europe should be plunged into war
merely because a small country was threatened by a big and powerful neighbor. He
then proceeded to outline the largest principle for which England
“Through Don Bigelow, the First Secretary of the American legation
in Bern Switzerland
“I still had difficulty believing that this cheery, extroverted man was actually engaged in intelligence work. I thought of spies as grim-faced gimlet-eyed characters wearing gray felt hats with flipped-down brims and belted raincoats with turned-up collars. However the idea intrigued me. Maybe my childhood dreams of excitement and adventure were about to come true. I remembered the motto on a set of children’s books I had once peddled from door to door in
What the child admired
The youth endeavored.
And the man acquired.”
“Was I actually to become a spy at last?”
“I took an afternoon train over to Bern six o’clock . By
that time I had unearthed some further facts about Allen Dulles. He was a Princeton
graduate, a Republican, the son of Presbyterian clergyman from upstate New
York Wilson India
“In Bern
Bancroft is greeted by Dulles’ butler, Pierre, a
French-Swiss, who later “was to confide in me that as far as the war effort was
concerned, ‘Mr. Dulles has his role. I have mine. You see, madame, he is a
gentleman. He understands nothing.”
“Allen, appearing from a nearby room, ushered me into a
study with wood-paneled walls and dark red draperies framing the windows that
looked out over the terraced garden that extended down to the river Aar .
Two comfortable armchairs were drawn up in front of the fireplace which a fire
was burning – a luxury that only diplomats could afford in those days. Against
the wall opposite the fireplace was a sofa that matched the armchairs and above
the sofa, a vitrine in which the most conspicuous object was a large, white porcelain
fish. If that fish had been able to talk, he certainly would have told some of
the most interesting anecdotes of World War II….”
“We had recently learned that there was a homosexual
underground operating among the Foreign Offices of England, Switzerland, Greece
and our own State Department, and through which information traveled more
rapidly than by the channels of the Catholic Church an various Jewish
organizations….”
“In my innocence, I imagined that my new job would be just
an extension of the work I had been doing for Gerry plus copies of my personal
journal entries and anything I learned talking with people coming from Germany Switzerland
“…my feeling for Allen was much deeper than my feeling for
Leopold had been, partly because I was older and had spent so much time working
with Professor Jung to learn about myself, but more importantly because of how
perfectly Allen and I could work together. The speed with which he could think,
the ingenuity with which he could find solutions to even the most complicated
problems, were thrilling to me. I had never before found anyone who reacted as
quickly to everything, and this was tremendously exhilarating to me.”
“Throughout the war Allen called me every morning at exactly
9:20 and in very few words indicated
what he wanted me to do, where I should go, whom I should see. Anyone listening
in on our conversations wouldn’t have had the least idea of what we were
talking about, for they were a combination of American slang and ridiculous
names for people and places. If during the day I had to call him because there
had been some new development or someone I was supposed to meet had failed to
show up at the expected rendezvous, I never ceased to be amazed at the speed
with which he caught the drift of what I was trying to convey and how quickly
he could exercise judgment about the best way to handle even the most ticklish
situations. In short, I had perfect confidence in him and an overwhelming
admiration for his abilities.”
Among her colleagues in Switzerland were journalists
Francois Bondy and Bob Jungk, as well as socialist Anna Siemsen, of whom
Bancroft wrote: “It may seem to those nourished on the exploits of James Bond,
the spy novels of John Le Carre and Graham Greene, to say nothing of the
factual postwar memoirs of feats of derring-do, that the journalistic
activities of Bob and Francois and the views of Anna Sienmsen have little to do
with intelligence work. But intelligence is a mosaic. General material about
background and people’s interrelationships can be both illuminating and
important. Quite often missing pieces of the mosaic emerge that make a previously
incomprehensible picture unexpectedly clear.”
“I very quickly learned the importance of personal
relationships, how important it was to win people’s trust and confidence. Once
this trust and confidence had been established, their own contacts would be
opened up to me….”
“On my weekly visits to Bern DON ”T
MOVE , DON ’T
MAKE A SOUND. The doorbell rang again. Then there was a pause, then another
ring…More minutes passed until there was banging on the door…Another ten
minutes passed and there was the faint sound of the outside door o the
vestibule closing…”
While Bancroft suspects the visitor was someone she knew at
the embassy, Dulles himself later told the story to a group of new CIA
recruits, and noted that he later learned the visitor was Leon Trotsky, who was
searching out for Dulles to give some extremely valuable information. Lesson
learned.
Then one day Dulles told Bancroft, “He puffed on his pipe
for a few moments, then said, ‘There’s this German….I’ve known an awful lot of
people in my life, but never anyone quite like him. He’s a member of the
Canaris organization – the intelligence service of the German Army known as the
Abwehr. He’s brought me a fantastic story. My office is piled high with
denunciations of him as a double agent. But he can’t get anything out of me, I
don’t know what’s being planned at Allied headquarters…I’m inclined to believe
his story, but you can never be sure. He’s not the kind of person to whom you
can offer money; money doesn’t interest him. But he does have one weakness. He
has written a book about his experiences in the Third Reich. He wants this book
translated so that it will be ready for publication the minute the war ends. I
want you to translate it.”
Hans Bernard Gisevius
Hans Bernard Gisevius
“The manuscript was bound in three thick volumes, clearly
labeled in the best German tradition: The Burning of the Reichstag, the
Thirteenth of June, The Fritsch-Blombert Crisis….a fourth volume was listed:
Reinhard Heydrich: the Story of a Futile Terror.”
“Gradually, I became familiar with contents of Gisevius’s
book. In 1933, after passing his bar examination and planning to make a career
in government service, he ha applied for a position in the Prussian Ministry of
the Interior and had been recommended by Undersecretary Grauert, whom he knew
slightly, to Rudolph Diels, the newly appointed chief of the Prussian Geheime
Staatspolizei. It had not taken Gisevius long to discover that extraordinary
things were happening in this department, and he had set about getting himself
transferred out of it as quickly as possible. In the meantime, he had become
friends with Arthur Nebe, his immediate superior and noted criminologist, whom
the Nazis had retained when they had discovered that their own thugs were
incapable of professional police work.”
“Eventually, they uncovered enough evidence indicating that
the Nazis themselves, not the Communists as the Nazis had proclaimed, had set
fire to the Reichstag…Gisevius’s detailed account of the way in which General
von Fritsch had been removed as Commander-in-Chief of the Army on a trumped-up
charge of homosexuality was a first….But what made Gisevius’s manuscript such
dynamite was his description of the many attempts by various generals and
highly placed civilians to organize a coup d’etat. Initially, these conspirators
planned their putsch to take over the government simply by removing Hitler from
office. Later they realized hat they would have to kill him if anything as
complicated as a coup d’etat were to succeed.”
“Within the group of conspirators were such men as Dr.
Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank; Ulrich von Hassell, the German
ambassador to Rome; Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig; clergymen like
Dietrich Bonhoeffer; lawyers; labor leaders; professors; a group of young
idealists known as the Kreisau Circle gathered around Count Helmuth von Moltke
and various military men like Field Marshal Erwin von Witzeleben, General
Ludwig Beck, and General Franz Halder, chief of the German General Staff. The
conspiracy had the blessings of Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, although
his subordinate, Colonel Hans Oster, acted as the coordinator of the activities
of the conspirators. A small number of Abwehr members actively served as
couriers This Abwehr connections was absolutely essential. The Gestapo did not
dare touch the intelligence service of the German Army and Abwehr members could
travel freely.”
“After Heinrich Himmler had coordinated the police of the
Reich, Nebe was made an SS general and played an extremely important role in
the conspiracy. He was able to warn the conspirators of the activities of the
Gestapo and to prevent anything that might arouse suspicions being brought to
Himmler’s attention.”
“By the time I finished reading Gisevius’s book, had to
gotten to know him better, and had realized that there was actually an active
opposition at work within Germany Switzerland Russia Switzerland Sweden
“Gisevius was very anxious to meet Jung and have Jung read
his book....I told Jung that whenever I wanted Gisevius to phone, all I had to
do was to think about him for about ten minutes. Then the phone would ring and
he would ask, ‘Yes? What is it? I just got your message to call!’ Jung was very
interested in this phenomenon and asked me to keep close track of it for him.
Allen, of course, thought it crazy…”
“Stauffenberg insisted that after the assassination the
question of purges must be handled with extreme care. He ha no objection to
punishing the Nazi and Gestapo killers, but he would not permit any of the
field marshals to be condemned because of their spineless attitude toward
Hitler’s invasions….Gisevius said that only a broad purge would convince the
Allies that there had been a fundamental change rather than merely a tactical
shift….”
“Hitler’s conferences were often held in an underground
bunker. The explosive force of the bomb had been calculated with that in mind.
But on July 20 Hitler, with his deadly intuition probably at work, had ordered
the conference held in a wooden-reinforced conference barracks. When
Stauffenberg had arrived at headquarters, he had placed the briefcase
containing the bomb under the table over which Hitler was learning. At an
auspicious moment, through a prearranged signal with Von Haeften, Stauffenberg
had had himself called to the phone. With a quick movement of the foot, he had
set the bomb mechanism and left the room. He and Von Haeften were not more than
a hundred yards away when there was a thunderous explosion. They saw flames and
several bodies, as well as part of the barracks, shoot into the air. They raced
for their car and in the general confusion, were able to reach the airport and
take off for Berlin
“When Olbricht had received the code word, Valkyrie, he had
stormed into Fromm’s office and told him he had just received word that the
Fuhrer had been the victim of an assassination. Fromm’s duty was to immediately
issue the code word for internal disorder to the various deputy headquarters
indicating that the power of the state had passed into the hands of the army.”
“While Gisevius was still being
filled in by Beck, Stauffenberg, accompanied by Olbricht, had gone to Fromm’s
office an told him that Hitler was dead and that he, Stauffenberg, was able to
confirm this Nevertheless, Fromm chose to believe Keitel’s report and tried to
place Stauffenberg and Olbricht under arrest. Olbricht protested, ‘You can’t
arrest us. You don’t seem to realize who has the power now. We arrest you!’”
“A radio statement about the
failure of the assassination had been made, Olbricht said. No details, not a
word about who the assassin had been, were given. Olbricht now had no doubts
that Hitler was still alive. Furthermore, he had learned that Hitler was having
tea with Mussolini, who, in another one of those incredible coincidences of
that fantastic day, had chosen that particular moment to pay a call on the
Fuhrer.”
“…The Grossdeutschland Guards
Battalion and its Commander, Major Otto Remer, had been alerted and ordered to
arrest Goebbels. At that very moment, however, Remer was marching instead on
the Bendlerstrasse to arrest the conspirators….Actually, at this moment,
Gisevius pointed out, the thirty-year-old Major Remer was probably the single
most important army officer in Germany
“That evening the Struencks and
Gisevius sat around the radio. For an hour there were announcements that Hitler
would speak to the people, but the broadcast was repeatedly postponed. Then, in
the early-morning hours, the music stopped abruptly and the announcer declared.
‘The Fuhrer will speak!”
“With the first words it was
obvious that he voice was Hitler’s. The putsch was over. The problem for
Gisevius and the Struencks was what to do next.”
Gisevius testifying at Nuremberg - Sent Goering to the Gallows
“After the war, Schacht called
Gisevius as a witness for him at Nuremberg
“Gisevius married his Fraulein
Braut, spent some time in Texas Germany lake
of Geneva
“It would seem that every
generation has to have its war. World War II was certainly mine. It changed me,
my life, my whole outlook on the world. I have never been able to see anything
in the same way since.”
“As I come to the end of this
story about the first fifty years of my life, I can’t help wondering
what….CW…would have to say about it all. CW…would advise, ‘Write it up, Mary!
Write it all up!. Then he would add his usual admonition, ‘But remember that
facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie!’”
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