Between the Alps and a Hard Place by Angelo M. Codevilla

assigned them to run their own networks in loose coordination with Roger Masson’s official intelligence shop. Hausamann’s operation, known as the Büro Ha , received information from long-standing contacts in Germany, some of whom were high in the government and opposed Hitler. In addition, the Büro Ha funneled to Guisan the well-informed reports of Rudolf Roessler, a refugee German journalist who had become a major anti-Nazi political commentator under the name Hermes. Roessler shared with the Swiss some of the apparently timely and valuable information on German plans that he communicated to the Soviet Union, where he was code-named Lucy . In sum, both for the sake of Switzerland’s own intelligence and for that of the Allies, Swiss authorities had to be quite permissive of foreign intelligence within their borders—with the exception of espionage against Switzerland.
    As a businessman who spent much time in Germany, Hausamann had been so shocked by the rise of Hitler that he had turned to journalism to warn his country. He wrote and published a book on the need for defense against Germany and produced movies on the same theme, at one time buying up every projector in the country. A man of the political right, he spent so much effort preaching rearmament to Swiss Socialists that he acquired friends and sympathy on the left. His rightist friends in Germany transmitted to him—by nonelectronic means—information from a variety of high-level contacts,
including one of their number who worked in Hitler’s communications office.
    But note well: Hausamann’s dynamism did not cause information to flow. That cause was high-level, anti-Hitler sentiment in Germany. The ReichsicherheitHauptamt (headquarters of Reich security) was aware of this network of conservative high-ranking anti-Hitler officers and dubbed it the “Black Orchestra.” Hausamann called his network into the right-wing anti-Hitler underground “the Viking Line.”
    Then in 1942, one of Hausamann’s leftist friends put him in contact with Roessler, whose information apparently also came from former military colleagues who had risen in the Wehrmacht . So, Hausamann was the recipient of two excellent military networks. Although the political coloration of Roessler’s sources was unclear, Roessler himself also transmitted his intelligence through Sandor Rado, a Hungarian Communist living in Switzerland as a cartographer and running an intelligence radio relay service from Lausanne to Moscow. At the beginning of the war, Rado’s organization, known as the Dora ring, was the main part of Moscow’s intelligence in Western Europe that had not been shut down by the Stalin-Hitler Pact. After mid-1942 Dora was functioning as the last surviving piece of the famed German Communist spy organization, Leopold Trepper’s “Red Orchestra.” Thus Switzerland in general and Hausamann in particular were at the crossroads of the two main lines of espionage coming out of Germany.
    In addition, Max Weibel was receiving information from the anti-Hitler element of his former classmates in Germany’s war college, while the Abwehr’s chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was passing information to the Swiss as well as to the Allies through the German vice consul in Zurich, Hans Gisevius, as well as through a young Polish refugee, Halina Zymanska.
Then, beginning after the great German defeats of 1943, a panoply of German officials, ranging from the plotters who would eventually try to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, to emissaries from Himmler himself, were contacting the Allies in Switzerland.
    The German government was aware of an intelligence hemorrhage through Switzerland. Direction-finding radio receivers had established that nightly encrypted traffic was emanating from the Geneva area. Cryptological analysis showed that the messages were from Dora to Moscow, and that the information was important. Germany