The Lucy spy ring

The Lucy story was told first, and most vividly, by people with reasons to embellish it. In its popular form, a quiet German publisher in Lucerne received the German high command's decisions within hours and relayed them to Moscow, turning the war in the East. CIA's analyst Mark Tittenhofer, working from the surviving radio traffic, reached a blunter verdict¹:

the widely accepted story that Lucy was a master spy is nothing but a myth.

What remains when the myth is stripped off is still remarkable.

The Swiss network

Lucy was one source among many feeding a Soviet military intelligence network in Switzerland that German counterintelligence called the Rote Drei, the Red Three, after its transmitters; the network was treated as part of the wider Red Orchestra^1,6. Its resident director was Alexander Radó, a Hungarian cartographer in Geneva, code-named Dora. Before him, Ursula Kuczynski, the agent known as Sonia and later as Ruth Werner, had run a parallel group and trained the British radio operator Alexander Foote; she left for England in December 1940¹.

Radó had three principal agents. The most important was Rachel Dübendorfer, code-named Sissy, in Bern. Her cut-out, Christian Schneider ("Taylor"), brought her the typed reports of a German émigré in Lucerne whom Moscow called Lucy¹. Lucy was Rudolf Roessler, born in Kaufbeuren in 1897, a theater critic and journalist who left Germany for Lucerne in 1934 and ran a small anti-Nazi publishing house, Vita Nova⁵. He also supplied the Swiss: from 1939 he reported to Bureau Ha, a semi-official intelligence office run by Major Hans Hausamann that worked alongside Swiss military intelligence^1,5.

What the radio traffic shows

The CIA study rests on 437 messages judged authentic, about 8 percent of the estimated total of 5,000. They show that the Swiss network exchanged traffic with Moscow from about August 1941 to May 1944, and that Sissy first took on Taylor and Lucy only in the late summer of 1942¹. That date rules out the claim, first made by Foote, that Lucy warned Moscow of the June 1941 invasion; the study traces that claim in part to messages it judges spurious¹.

Of 332 messages from Radó to Moscow in the CIA collection, 69 cite a source called Werther, 31 Teddy, 26 Olga and 11 Anna. Together these four, all reporting through Lucy, account for about 42.5 percent of the traffic¹. Moscow pressed again and again to learn who they were. In April 1943 the Center told Sissy that the Taylor-Lucy group "remains wholly unclarified for us" and asked for a personality sketch of Lucy¹. She refused to give him up, and Roessler never met Radó¹.

The traffic also shows money changing hands. A message from November 1943 reports Sissy's warning that "Lucy group no longer works when the salary stops," and Moscow answered that the group would be paid according to its demands¹.

Who were the sources?

Arrest and afterlife

The Germans had detected the Swiss transmissions and pressed Bern to act⁴. In October 1943 Swiss police arrested the operators Edmond and Olga Hamel and Margarete Bolli; Foote followed on 20 November¹. Roessler, Schneider and Dübendorfer were arrested in May 1944, Roessler on 19 May, and from that date his reports to both Moscow and London stopped¹. Lucy's material had therefore ended before the 20 July 1944 bomb plot, which undercuts claims that it flowed until the conspirators were arrested¹. He was released on 6 September 1944. A Swiss military court heard the case in October 1945; Dübendorfer and her partner Paul Böttcher, who had fled to France, were sentenced in absentia to two years, while Roessler was by most accounts convicted without further punishment^1,5.

Roessler returned to espionage after the war. From 1947, with his friend Xaver Schnieper, he sold reports on Western forces in West Germany to Czechoslovak intelligence, and through it to Moscow. A Swiss court convicted both men in November 1953¹. Roessler died in 1958^1,5. Radó, recalled to Moscow in 1945, spent years in Soviet prison before his release after Stalin's death⁶.

Read next

1938 – 3 May 1945 The Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) Rote Kapelle was the German counterintelligence name for Soviet radio networks in Belgium, France and the Netherlands and for a Berlin resistance circle that passed secrets to Moscow. Most were rounded up in 1942. December 1932 – May 1945 Ultra and the breaking of Enigma How Polish mathematicians first broke the German Enigma machine, and how Britain's codebreakers at Bletchley Park turned that start into Ultra, the most closely guarded intelligence source of the Second World War. Germany · 1920–1944 Abwehr The German armed forces' intelligence service from 1920 to 1944: spies, saboteurs and counterintelligence under Admiral Canaris, outplayed by the FBI and MI5 and finally absorbed by the SS. 1887–1945 Wilhelm Canaris Admiral who ran the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944. Early supporter of Hitler, later a protector of the military opposition, hanged at Flossenbürg in April 1945. September 1933 – 18 October 1941 The Sorge spy ring From 1933 to 1941 a Soviet military intelligence network in Tokyo, run by the German journalist Richard Sorge, reported from inside the German embassy and Prince Konoe's circle until Japanese police broke it. 1914–1990s Signals intelligence Intelligence from intercepted communications and electronic emissions, from Room 40 and the Zimmermann telegram to Ultra, Venona, the Berlin tunnel and NSA's domestic programs exposed by the Church Committee.