A platoon of Navajo Code Talkers stand in formation at Camp Elliot, Calif., under the supervision of Staff Sgt. Philip Johnston. The Navajo created the first version of the their code at Camp Elliot.

When the United States entered World War II, the nation had no central intelligence system. On June 11, 1941, President Roosevelt issued a military order establishing the office of Coordinator of Information—the agency that would on June 13, 1942, become the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Officially it was under the supervision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but in most ways it operated independently. Eventually it had five branches: Secret Intelligence, for the procurement of information by clandestine means; Secret Operations, for work behind the lines and encouraging resistance movements; Research and Analysis, for using available information like the price of oranges to guide military strategy; Morale Operations, for psychological warfare, which sponsored radio stations purportedly operated by German anti-Nazis inside Germany and distributed propaganda encouraging the enemy to defect or not to fight; and X-2, counterintelligence—spying on spies. Its head, William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, recruited a group of 15,000 elite, well-off men and women—an adventurous, often unconventional lot.

OSS personnel were elaborately trained, at first in British and Canadian camps, and later under the supervision of social psychologist Kenneth Baker at “The Farm” in Maryland, about 20 miles from Washington, D.C. Agents who were to go abroad were taught to recruit local subagents to assist them in their work, to choose cover identities to account for their presence in a particular place and explain their source of income, to disguise themselves by drastic changes in their appearance, to use codes and secret inks, to recognize aircraft, and to kill quickly and silently. At another base on Long Island, New York, playwright and presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood trained agents for foreign-propaganda broadcasting.

The OSS sent about 200 spies inside Germany, mostly foreign nationals and German prisoners of war, whom the OSS called “deserter-volunteers,” but almost all of them were soon captured. During the Battle of the Bulge, for instance, the OSS had only three active agents there. The organization also sent agents to assist the resistance movements in the countries occupied by Germany. Spain was a hotbed of spies and refugees where Allied and Axis agents eavesdropped on each other. Americans there painstakingly gathered information about conditions inside Germany from gossip and from Spanish and Portuguese newspapers. Support personnel known as backup agents searched the bodies of dead Germans to obtain papers that their expert forgers could alter or imitate. Others in the United States collected information from European refugees and bought European clothes from them to be used for disguises.

Perhaps the greatest success in Allied espionage came from the cryptographers, who not only taught agents to encode their messages but also toiled in offices in Great Britain and the United States decoding intercepted messages broadcast by the enemy. Throughout most of the war the Allies enjoyed the advantage of being able to read “secret” German documents and transmissions, thanks in part to the capture of enemy codebooks and a German Enigma encoding machine, and in part to the brilliant work of Allied cryptographers, particularly the Polish and the British.

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The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operated in several countries in the Pacific theater, including China. In Burma, for instance, an OSS group led by former Los Angeles police officer Carl Eifler taught the Kachin, members of a hill tribe, to operate radios and encode messages while learning survival skills in jungle warfare from them.

Additionally, a few Americans who had successfully hidden when the Japanese invaded the Philippines or had escaped from Japanese prisoner-of-war camps joined with indigenous guerrillas in resistance movements. Almost all the “coastwatchers” who hid in the jungles to observe and report Japanese naval movements were Australian, but at least one American, Cpl. Benjamin Franklin Nash, did that dangerous work. In the summer of 1943 he was alone on Kolombangara in the Solomon Islands, sending reports of barge sightings by walkie-talkie to an Australian naval officer who then relayed them to call in Allied air strikes. When the Japanese pulled out of the area that fall, Nash managed to join up with invading Americans and land with them on Bougainville.

The 375 to 420 Navajo Code Talkers in the Pacific theater participated in every U.S. Marine assault there from 1942 to 1945. They served in Marine Raider battalions and parachute units, almost instantaneously transmitting information from one unit to another in a code the Japanese never broke. Even other Navajo could not understand the Code Talkers because under the leadership of Philip Johnson, son of a missionary to their tribe, a group of Navajo created a sophisticated alphabet and code dictionary. The alphabet used as many as three Navajo words for each letter of the English alphabet: For example, the letter a could be represented by the Navajo words for ant, apple, or axe. To encode a message, the Code Talkers spelled out English or Japanese words with strings of Navajo words—a meaningless jumble to their tribespeople. For commonly used terms, place names, and military terms they used Navajo words and phrases: wola-chi-a-moffa-gahn (a bout) for about; beshlo (iron fish) for submarine; cha-yes-desi (rolled hat) for Australia. The Code Talkers memorized the alphabet and the code dictionary so thoroughly that they could work at lightning speed: It was said that they could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds.

The unit of the German General Staff charged with intelligence assessment, the Fremde Heere (Foreign Armies) was formed following the outbreak of World War I as the Nachrichtenabteilung (Intelligence Division). It was renamed Fremde Heere in 1917. The unit obtained most of its raw data from Abteilung IIIb and was led initially by Richard Hentsch. Although officially disbanded after the war, it continued to function disguised as an army statistical office until its reinstatement in 1931. Seven years later, a bifurcation of responsibility along geographic lines created the Fremde Heere Ost and Fremde Heere West.

Kurt von Tippelskirch

KURT VON TIPPELSKIRCH, (1891–1957).

The head of Fremde Heere prior to World War II, Kurt von Tippelskirch was born in Berlin on 9 October 1891, the son of a Prussian general. An officer in the elite corps that guarded Emperor William II prior to 1914, he was severely wounded at the first battle of the Marne and spent the remainder of World War I in French captivity. Afterward, his knowledge of other languages became a key factor in his appointment to Fremde Heere, at that time a disguised unit known as T 3. With its expansion and division into two branches in 1938—Fremde Heere West and Fremde Heere Ost—the new army chief of staff, Franz Halder, designated Tippelskirch as the overall supervisor (or Oberquartiermeister IV). His tasks did not involve the evaluation of raw intelligence and formulation of reports but consisted instead of coordinating the pieces into a unified whole and validating the experts working under him. Briefings with Halder took place on a regular basis.

Anxious to see combat, Tippelskirch was replaced by Gerhard Matzky on 5 January 1941 and given command first of a battalion, then a regiment, and finally an army in the offensive against the Soviet Union. Although a plane crash in July 1944 caused his brief hospitalization, he returned to active duty during the final stages of the war. Following his surrender to Allied forces, Tippelskirch was kept in captivity in Wales and Germany until 1948. His history of World War II, published in 1951 and relying on other eyewitness information as well, was the first full account to appear in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany. He died in Lüneburg (Lower Saxony) on 10 May 1957.

FREMDE HEERE OST (FHO).

The principal body responsible for collating and analyzing intelligence concerning the armed forces of the Soviet Union, the Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East) was officially established on 10 November 1938. Its initial head, Eberhard Kinzel, was replaced in March 1942 by Reinhard Gehlen, who served until April 1945. In Gehlen’s major reorganization, the FHO was divided into six groups containing several subsections: Group I prepared daily situation reports; Group II analyzed Soviet military operations; Group III translated captured documents, radio transmissions, and Soviet propaganda and periodicals; Group IV focused on Scandinavia; Group V drew up situation maps; Group VI was charged with general administration. Given the scope of its assignments, the staff was a relatively small one, consisting of 50 officers, 70 noncommissioned officers, and 60 clerks.

Possessing no intelligence collection agency of its own, the FHO had to depend on numerous sources, including the Abwehr, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Foreign Office, and the Luftwaffe —all exceedingly protective of their own domain. Moreover, the lack of agents deep in the Red Army’s rear made the FHO highly vulnerable to large-scale deception schemes, such as Operation Scherhorn. An overriding failure of German intelligence was its underestimation of the magnitude of Soviet attacks and counterattacks at critical junctures in the war.

ALEXIS VON ROENNE, (1903–1944).

A senior intelligence officer with the Fremde Heere Ost and Fremde Heere West as well as a staunch opponent of the Nazi regime, Alexis von Roenne was born on 22 February 1903, the son of a Baltic German noble family. After Reinhard Gehlen took command of Fremde Heere Ost in April 1942, Roenne headed Desk IIz, which was in charge of the interrogation camps for Russian prisoners of war, and played a key role in the formation of the anti-Soviet army of liberation led by General Andrei Vlasov. In March 1943, Roenne became head of Fremde Heere West and concentrated on gathering information regarding the Atlantic front. Whether his reports deliberately drew attention away from the planned Allied landings in Normandy—and thus helped ensure a defeat for the Nazi regime—remains an unresolved issue. Although his Christian beliefs prevented his participation in the conspiracy of 20 July 1944 against Adolf Hitler, Roenne’s close contact with anti-Nazi officers, including Claus von Stauffenberg, led to his arrest by the Gestapo and execution at Plötzensee Prison on 12 October.

FREMDE HEERE WEST (FHW).

An intelligence branch of the Armed Forces High Command, the Fremde Heere West (Foreign Armies West) was created on 10 November 1938 and focused on the armies of Western Europe, Great Britain, the upper Balkans, and the United States (except for one brief interlude after Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war). Based in Zossen, just south of Berlin, it was headed successively by Ulrich Liss, Alexis von Roenne, and Willi Bürklein. With only a limited number of standard intelligence sources at its disposal, the FHW depended to a large degree on the accumulated general knowledge of its staff. Large guidebooks were compiled on individual countries and covered such topics as military geography and organization, armaments, training, and education. Most notable was its strategic conceptualization in the campaign against France and the Low Countries in 1940.

ULRICH LISS, (1897–?).

The first chief of the Fremde Heere West (FHW), Ulrich Liss was born in Mecklenburg and served in a frontline artillery regiment in World War I. He was also a prize-winning rider and ardent Anglophile, having visited Great Britain on several occasions. Upon the division of Fremde Heere into two branches in 1938, Kurt von Tippelskirch appointed Liss to head the FHW, which had responsibility for military intelligence regarding Western Europe and Britain, the upper Balkans, and the United States. Although staff officers remained in key positions, Liss additionally hired civilians with particular skills and knowledge from having lived abroad; he also broadened the functions of the FHW to include assessments of a hostile power’s intentions, not just capabilities. In war games using oversized maps or sand tables at army headquarters, Liss frequently assumed the role of the enemy commander in chief.

Under his direction, the FHW performed almost flawlessly during the campaign against the Low Countries and France in 1940, especially through its concept of the Ardennes offensive. Yet it later failed to anticipate the Allied landings in North Africa. Given a field assignment in March 1943, Liss took command of a regiment on the eastern front and was promoted to general. He was severely wounded and taken prisoner by the Red Army in January 1945. Remaining in Soviet captivity until 1955, Liss returned to Germany and in 1959 published his first-hand account Westfront 1939–1940 (Western Front 1939–1940).

FREMDE LUFTWAFFE.

The main intelligence branch of the Luftwaffe, the Fremde Luftwaffe (Foreign Air Forces) was headed by Josef Schmidt until October 1942. Because intelligence enjoyed little prestige within the air force command, much rivalry and friction developed in a highly decentralized atmosphere (10 different groups, for example, were charged with radar monitoring). As a result, its analytical capacity was severely limited.

Under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, Foreign Armies East directed military espionage against the Soviet Union. It became infamous for blunders and contributed to the ultimate defeat of German invasion and occupation forces in the Soviet Union.

Where the Russians really fooled the Germans was in the lead up to Operation Bagration, which destroyed Army Group Center in June-August 1944. The Germans expected the attack against Army Group South, and had strengthened it at the expense of AG Center. The week before the Russian assault, Col. Gehlen predicted a quiet summer in AG Center’s sector. Somehow, he overlooked the incident in his memoirs.

Beyond doubt the greatest achievement of “Maskirovka” on a larger scale was to leave the German intelligence under Gehlen in ignorance that Stalin had moved 9 armies and 1 tank-corps from STAVKA-reserve to strengthen the central push in Poland. This resulted a superiority of 5-7: 1 (Glantz, 1989, 498).

In January 1945 German Intelligence represented Army Group-A in Poland as facing odds of 1:3, whereas the true proportion by January was an altogether overwhelming 1:5 (Gehlen missed the movement of armies from STAVKA reserve, underestimating the number of Russian formations concentrated in and immediately behind the 3 Vistula bridgeheads by wide margin).

Not that Soviet sources were any more accurate. OKH (Army High Command) strength reports show roughly 2.1 million German soldiers on the Eastern Front on 1 November 1944 plus about 200,000 men in Allied forces. The Soviets claim they were opposed by 3.1 million -men. On January 1945 Soviet sources cite German armor strength at 4,000 tanks and self-propelled guns. German records show about 3,500 tanks and self-propelled guns. The Soviets credit the Germans with 28,500 guns and mortars while German records show a figure of 5,700. Similar discrepancies between Soviet and German data exist throughout the war. But this another motive altogether…