A MAN CALLED GEORGE WOOD

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500110012-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 9, 2005
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: January 1, 1981
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

BOY'S LIFE
DP91-9wR00b1100
With the little mart as
their listening post,
American agents would
hear every growl of the
Nazi war machine.
AMAN
CALLED
GEORGE
Oda
BY ROBERT G. DEINDORFER
ILLUSTRATION BY FRED OTNES
them had talked for almost an hour,
Gerald Mayer asked the stranger to
please come to the point. Mayer had
arranged the secret meeting at the
stranger's request, and he was tired of
waiting.
Whatever it was, Mayer didn't expect
it. to amount to much. As a wartime
intelligence officerin the American
Legation in Bern, Switzerland, he'd in-
terviewed enough Swiss, Austrian and
German sources to develop a fairly sure
feel for people. Somehow, Mayer's in-
stincts told him the gaunt stranger was
just. another harmless crank without
anything important to contribute.
Briefly, very briefly, the man hesitat-
ed. It was a small thing, but Mayer filed
the reaction away in his mind. Then the
man reached into the side pocket of his
dark, rumpled coat. He opened an en-
velope, shook out some papers, pushed
them across the desk.
Gerald Mayer felt his nerve ends
tighten as he read the papers that after-
noon in August of 1943. They were all
typed in formal German, all stamped
Geheime Reich Sache. If they were gen-
uine, they were nothing less than secret
official reports from the Nazi German
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 Approve se 2006/01/03: CIA-RDP91-00901R0005
he American spymaster
was shocked to learn
there was a German agent
on the household staff.
Mayer tried to keep his voice casual. know whether the two men were being
"I am merely acting as an agent for a followed by anyone. As things turned
friend who works in the Ausu'acrtige out, they weren't.
Amt (Foreign Office), he said. "This Moments later the heavy, wrought-
man is here now in Bern. He arrived iron door clashed shut behind the two
yesterday as a special diplomatic visitors.
courier." In view of his lofty secret rank in the
All of a sudden Mayer knew what he American intelligence structure, the
had to do. Excusing himself, he ran resident OSS chief was introduced not as
upstairs and rapped on the door of his Dulles but as Douglas, identified not as
superior. He told of his conversation Mat'er's superior but as an assistant.
with the stranger and passed the Sometimes small deceits made a big
documents over. difference.
Allen Dulles, chief of America's Office In a comfortable office up on the
of Strategic Services in Switzerland and, second floor the four men had a cool
later, Director of the CIA, listened care- drink. After a few minutes of talk the
fully. The tweedy, pipe-smoking short, balding German got right to the
spymaster asked Mayer a question, point. He opened a thick brown en-
asked another, before he picked up the velope, a German swastika stamped into
papers. At first glance they looked like the red scaling wax, and produced a
the real thing. heavy bundle of papers.
Yet, on the basis of his long experience "If I'm not mistaken, you will find
in the field, Dulles was all too aware of here 186 separate items of information,"
the fact that things are seldom what he said.
they seem in the world of spies. The Out they came, verbatim copies of
most likely looking informants turn out official documents, paraphrases of ca-
to be setups trained to play an artful bles and dispatches, abrupt shorthand
double game, feeding false information notes of staff meetings, reports of visits
dished up by enemy headquarters. by the Japanese ambassador, sabotage
"This could be an attempt to break missions in occupied France, and reports
our code," Dulles picked at his words. on Nazi troop morale along the Russian
"The Germans figure we'll bite, cipher front. This was the diplomatic inventory
this stuff and radio it on to Washington. of a nation at war, secrets picked from
They monitor everything, including the the pockets of the Nazi German Foreign
Swiss commercial wireless channels." Office.
Mayer nodded. He was aware of the Despite a number of impressive intel-
hazards, too. ligence victories in both the First and
"Or perhaps our friend is an agent Second World Wars. Allen Dulles was
provocateur," Dulles said. "He plants awed. Blinking hard behind his glasses,
the information with us and then tips off shuffling through the documents with
the Swiss police that we are spying. His his big, thick-knuckled hands, he
rendezvous with us is proof, and we are realized that he'd never ever hit on a
kicked out of this country." mass of secret material to compare with
The OSS chief scratched a wooden it.
match and got his pipe going again. "You gentlemen will ask whether
"Still, there is just a glimmer of a chance these dispatches are authentic and, if so,
that this man is on the square." how I was able to get them." The Ger-
So the game would go on, at least for man leaned forward in his chair. "They
another play. Mayer agreed to make came from the material which crossed
arrangements for a secret meeting with my own desk at the Foreign Office."
the courier. As he explained it, he served as an
Promptly at midnight the gaunt man assistant to the Foreign Office liaison
and a short, balding companion clad in a officer with all the Nazi armed services
leather coat pulled the bell at the U.S. in Berlin. In that capacity he saw a
Legation. Not far away an OSS lookout regular flow of battle plans, submarine
sat watching from a parked car. An routings, troop movements, military
accomplice leaned against a wall on the government reports, special secret war
,
s.
was
ar
to say.
far side listening for any footsteps along projects and other highly classified Before he left the I' Q L
t
0fi ooo1 _tn documents revealing
Luftwaffe (German Air Force) total
strength and specific flight movements.
Bit by hit the visitor filled out the rest
of his story. He'd been with the Foreign
Office for a fairly lonz time--more than
15 years, in fact-serving in Germany
and abroad and had been given a series
of promotions. He w as a hard-working
bureaucrat helping turn the wheels of'
government. He found his job interest-
ing and challenging.
Dulles was impressed but still doubt-
ful. During a bend in the conversation
he asked the questions he'd been want-
ing to ask. He asked the-Foreign Office
employee what he thought of the Nazis.
In a chair on the far side of the room,
the mousy little mans face colored
some. He was a devoted German, he told
them, but also a strong anti-Nazi, al-
though he kept his opinions tightly bot-
tled up except in the _ompany of a few.
like-minded friends.
The more he talked, the more his
contempt for the Nazis showed through.
Almost a year earlier he'd even won-
dered about offering his own secret
services to one of the neutral
diplomats-Swedish, Swiss, Portu-
gese-stationed in Berlin. But with
security walls becoming more menacing
all the time, he finally decided on an-
other course.
In January of 1943, he began in secret
to copy important documents he saw
there in the Foreign Office. Month after
month he'd made copies of reports, ca-
bles, dispatches, communiques, inbound
and outbound correspondence. Sooner
or later he expected to be assigned a
special courier trip to Sweden or Swit-
zerland and would try to make a proper
connection.
When he was given a courier run to
Switzerland, he uncovered the classified
papers hidden in his home and strapped
them to his legs under his pants. He
caught the train assigned him, crossed
three frontiers without security people
discovering the materials he was carry-
ing, and contacted the Americans
through a friend. Now here he was.
The German bureaucrat didn't finish
his story until after three in the morn-
ing. All of them were worn and tired. Yet
a number of tough questions remained.
What if Nazi security forces dis-
covered he was stealing Foreign Office
secrets, for example? He was perfectly
willing to take his chances. What, did he
expect for his contributions? Even the
best-motivated of agents might accept
some money, if only to cover expenses.
Nothing, he wanted nothing at all: no
money, no favors, nothing except per-
haps some help once R orld War II was
over. When would he return to Switzer-
land with more intelligence data?
Weeks
even month
It
h
d
ega
lon to
the quiet Atli Oabc 'PoF' @tl ettYOO$lf(14]tOlYCiA}tRE)fR9t1vOO 0itROQ0500110012-1 Continued on page 58
28 BOYS' LIFE'' JANUARY 1981
 Ap1itfte*1EIl&Be&ea*d*QbM &d3 : CIA-RDP91-0
Continued from page 29
At terrible risk, the
undercover agent
stayed on
the job until the last
days of World War II.
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catch a train for Berlin later that morn- central Europe, among other high-
ing, a cover name had to be picked for priority items. With the Allied invasion
the agent. For no particular reason, of Europe a gathering success, Wood
Dulles hit on the name Wood, George , also spelled out the Nazi's elaborate new
Wood, which sounded as good as any.
Dulles and Mayer stayed up until
daybreak reading through the astonish-
ing harvest of material Wood left with
them. They sorted it into classifications:
military, air force, navy and diplomatic.
They marked passages they wanted to
cross-check with other data, pulled out
top secrets so perishable they had to be
shuttled on to Washington, D. C., im-
mediately. They realized America had
only scratched the surface of what was
yet to come, provided George Wood
followed through on his promise.
After all, even if the bureaucrat ac-
tually decided to risk his life by sys-
tematically stealing documents, he
might well be uncovered, imprisoned
and put to death by Nazi security. The
British had lost a valuable in-place
agent a month earlier; a Russian spy
ring operating in Frankfurt had come
unglued in April when a relay man
talked too much in a cafe.
In case Dulles needed any proof of
Nazi efficiency, he had only to recall a
shattering incident in Bern. At dinner
one evening his cook heard Dulles
speaking German with a distinguished-
looking guest. She slipped out of the
kitchen, examined the guest's hat and
took down the initials marked on the
inside. Next morning she turned the
information over to her Nazi espionage
contact. Luckily, word of her activities
got back to the American spymaster in
time to prevent further lapses.
Despite the risks, George Wood
became an American agent. In his lofted
second-floor office he wrote brief
shorthand memos about classified ca-
bles, transcribed the entire texts of of-
ficial communiques, riffled through
papers on adjoining desks in his section.
Two, sometimes three times a week he
remained long after normal hours to
make certain that no important infor-
mation escaped his notice.
Just when Dulles despaired of ever
seeing him again, Wood materialized in
Switzerland, in October, out on another
courier run to Bern. He turned over data
on a major Panzer troop transfer, stra-
tegic supplies of tungsten smuggled into
security program for occupied France.
After a quiet dinner in Dulles' house,
George Wood said he' wanted a pocket
Minox camera to photograph docu-
rnent.s instead of doing shorthand notes.
The two men developed a simple cipher
code based on symphony music. Before
their meeting came to an end that night
they even hit on an elaborate signal
system in case Dulles ever needed to
contact Wood directly in Berlin.
Once, just once, the owlish American
spy chief found that he had to cast an
emergency line. He proceeded according
to plan. Several clays later Wood
received a seemingly innocent post card
signed with the name of a fictitious
Swiss girl friend, on which she wrote
that an acquaintance who ran a toy
store had completely sold out of Japa-
nese toys.
Wood was able to read between the
lines. Next time he arrived in Switzer-
land he handed Dulles a sheaf of cable
copies of the Japanese military situation
from German officers based in the Far
East.
George Wood got back to Bern a
fourth time, and a fifth, and a sixth.
Altogether he supplied Allen Dulles and
the United States with more than 2,700
classified German documents. He passed
on so many vital top secrets that even
today it's difficult to say exactly which
one was the most valuable-although
the English remain especially thankful
that Dulles tipped them off to the fact
that a butler, code-named Cicero, or
Five Fingers, who served the British
Ambassador to Turkey, was actually a
Nazi spy.
More remarkable still, Wood contin-
ued producing secret material right up
through the last convulsions of the Nazi
Third Reich in 1945. He remains a fas-
cinating figure in an age dark with in-
trigue: a gifted major amateur among
hardrock professionals, a hero to some, a
traitor to others.
Perhaps Allen Dulles put Wood's
remarkable contributions in the most
realistic perspective. As Dulles told a
friend years later, mousy little George
Wood loved his own country so much
Germany from Spain in oran~a crates that he risked his life in an effort to save
and an abrupt chan,&W- f l4 t QI Rel(MS&200401/03 : CIA-RDP91-009
58 BOYS' LIFE *JANUARY 1981
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