For example, this spying cat. They really did exist, however absurd the idea sounds that the CIA cats implanted interception technology to target ambassadors and heads of state. The expensive project "Acoustic Kitty" was a complete failure - even the first Kitty came on the first use under the wheels of a taxi.
Christopher Nehring loves such stories. He is "Research Director" in the German Spy Museum in Berlin and has a doctorate in intelligence history. In his new book, he presents the "77 largest espionage myths riddled": Randseit to Ernst, of course, James Bond must not be missed.
1. Myth: The Nazis had no Jewish agents
The connection sounds outlandish - because of the Nazis' intended destruction of everything Jewish in Europe, something like a Jewish Nazi spy seems impossible. And yet there was (at least) one: Richard Kauder, real estate agent from Vienna.
In 1940 he was arrested as a "full Jew". But a friend of his father was since the "Anschluss" Austria's boss of "Abwehr", the spy service of the German Wehrmacht. Colonel Rudolf von Marogna-Redwitz rescued Kauder from certain death by recruiting him as a spy with the alias "Klatt".
Klatt was sent from Vienna to Bulgaria's capital, Sofia, to lead an agent ring, which broadcast reports on the Red Army and the Middle East to the "Southeast Air Force Head". According to his favorite fairy tale Klatt called these radio messages "Max messages" when it came to the Soviet Union, and "Moritz messages" to the Middle East. His main source, the exiled Russian Longin Ira, he had met in the Budapest prison.
The "Max and Moritz" reports soon reached the highest circles of the German Wehrmacht. The later BND president Reinhard Gehlen, then head of the army reconnaissance "Foreign Army East", held great chunk on Klatt.
Even Hitler had heard of Klatt in 1943 - and forbade the German secret services to work or recruit Jews. But Reinhard Gehlen considered Kauder to be his best source of information about the Red Army and did not want to lose "the Jew Klatt," as the agent was called internally.
That's why Gehlen tricked: The German services were forbidden to lead Jewish agents, but the vassals in Europe could get away with it. So Gehlen got the Hungarian secret service to lead Klatt as an agent. The information went on to Gehlen.
Dr. Winfried Meyer
Richard Kauder with his lover Ibolya KaÌlmaÌn, 1942
Klatt's messages had a flaw nobody knew they were wrong. Because of her remarkable knowledge of the Red Army, its military strategy and numerous conversations with talkative officials and diplomats in Sofia's nightclubs, Ira and Kauder had invented all the reports. Their ability to analyze and their sense of what people liked to hear were so good that Defense and the Wehrmacht were eager to get all the information they needed.
In 1943, however, it was too hot for Klatt. He traveled via Sofia to Budapest and in 1944 on to Salzburg, where he survived the last months of the war.
The end of the war did not mean the end of the agent. Reinhard Gehlen, the biggest fan of the Max and Moritz reports, worked as head of the "Organization Gehlen" and the later BND 1947 again in the espionage against the USSR, now on behalf of the US Army and the CIA. Klatt wanted to reactivate him, but his American servants, who had great doubts about the integrity of the agent, forbade him. Even in the war, the British codebreakers around Alan Turing had decrypted the German communication and knew that the Max messages were wrong.
Even with the Soviet secret service one had heard of the fabled agent and thought of revenge. Several times Soviet agents tried to kidnap Richard Kauder in Salzburg. But he also jumped from them. In 1960, Richard Kauder died completely impoverished in Salzburg - one of the most dazzling figures of the World War espionage, which had cunningly attempted to survive the great barbarism of the 20th century.
