The Rote Drei: CIA's study of the 'Lucy' radio traffic (c. 1969)

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Pages 1-25,27-45 of the 45-page original: one page that names a wartime source's family is left out; the rest of the article is complete. The full release is at the link below.

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CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room

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26 October 2026, from the government's own site

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Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

By the late 1960s the story of "Lucy", the anti-Nazi publisher Rudolf Roessler in Lucerne who supposedly fed Hitler's plans to Moscow, had grown into a legend. It had been retold in books by Alexander Foote, a radio operator for the network, and by the French writers Pierre Accoce and Pierre Quet. This article, written for CIA's classified journal Studies in Intelligence, set out to replace the legend with the record¹. CIA lists it in volume 13, number 3, and gives the author as Mark A. Tittenhofer. CIA does not state his position. The text speaks of "our holdings" and of research in classified files, and its citations, the latest from 1968, put it in about 1969^1,2. An editor's note says it is an abridgement of a longer study¹.

What it says

Tittenhofer builds everything on the radio traffic. He estimates that the Swiss network sent and received about 5,000 messages, and his collection holds 437 judged authentic, about 8 percent. Some of these come from the 129 messages Swiss police found when they arrested the operators Edmond and Olga Hamel on 9 October 1943¹.

The traffic dates things. Rachel Dübendorfer ("Sissy") took on Lucy's cut-out, Christian Schneider ("Taylor"), only in the late summer of 1942. That rules out Foote's claim that Lucy warned Moscow of the June 1941 invasion; Tittenhofer suspects the messages behind that story are forgeries¹. Messages show Moscow pressing Sissy, and Sissy refusing, to say who Lucy and his sources were¹.

The article then counts. Of 332 messages from Alexander Radó ("Dora") to Moscow, 69 cite Werther, 31 Teddy, 26 Olga and 11 Anna, about 42.5 percent of the outgoing traffic. All four came through Lucy¹. Tittenhofer rejects the idea that the names stood for offices (Werther for Wehrmacht and so on). He reports that in 1955 Roessler named four sources to a confidant, and he reads one of them as Hans Oster, chief of staff of the Abwehr under Canaris. He argues that the reports moved by Abwehr couriers and telephone lines controlled by the anti-Hitler conspirators¹.

The rest covers the other branches of the network, Ursula Kuczynski (Ruth Werner), the Czech officer Karel Sedláček who passed Lucy's material to London, and Roessler's second career selling reports to Czechoslovak intelligence from 1947 until his conviction in 1953. It closes on Swiss intelligence, which Tittenhofer says was far more involved than Switzerland admitted¹.

How to read it

This is an analyst's reconstruction, not a release of the messages themselves. Its counts depend on a collection that holds 8 percent of the traffic, and the author says so. Its judgments of people are sharp and sometimes speculative, for instance that Gisevius may have been the source "Rot." It was released in full in September 1993¹.

The copy served here leaves out one page that names a wartime source's relatives; nothing else is omitted. For the network's history in full, see The Lucy spy ring and The Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle)¹.