I would like to welcome you, as well as your good from cspan. I am doug swanson, visitor and Service Manager for the National Archive museum and the producer for the noon time lecture series. Before we begin todays program i would like to remind you of a few more we have coming up. Thursday march 16th, damian shields presents on the unforgotten irish. This is the u. S. Launch of the book and a book signing. March 27th, we will present a Film Screening and discussion of follow seeds which is presented in partnership with the d. C. Environmental film festival. To find out more about these and our programs take one of these monthly calendar events or visit our website. Our topic today is agent 110 an american spymaster and the german resistance in wwii by scott miller. Scott miller is an authorer and former correspondent for the wawall street journal. Journal. His first book was a Newsweek Magazine reader selection. He spent two decades in europe and asia reporting from more than 25 countries including two postings in germany to back up which is the backdrop of agent 110. He has been on the daily show, National Geographic channel and britain sky news. He has degrees in communication and masters in philosophy in International Relations from the university of cambridge. Please join me in welcoming scott miller to the National Archives. [applause] thanks, doug. I thought what i would do today is talk about the background behind this book, how we came to write it, and just use some of the characters along the way, describe a little bit about the final production and have time for questions and comments you have afterwards. I will readally con fes i did not set out to ride this book rea readily confess. I was interested originally in americans in the vietnam war. That period held an interest for me. Right after the war, the french invol invol involvement in china. I did a Little Research and crossed these two characters. There they are. Those are the dulles brothers. Allen dulles is in the lighter colored jacket. He was director of the cia during the 50s and the period i was interested in. The gentlemen in the dark suit is his older brother, john foster dulles, who was secretary of state. When i found these guys i thought there has to be an interesting story. Two brothers and i thought there has to be a Good Relationship and some good way of telling the story. I really dove in and discovered quickly, allen, the guy in the light colored jacket had been in switzerland during world war ii where he was a station chief for the office of Strategic Services and given code number 110. My interest immediately perked up. I have always been a bit of a world war ii geek and more importantly a frustrated ski bum. We lived in germany where i was newspaper correspondent and every weekend we could we would head down to switzerland and hit the slopes so the thought of doing a book that took place in switzerland captured by imagination. Allen had two relatives who were secretary of state, he served in the state Department Early in his career. He quit that job to make more money and went to wall street. He got a law degree and worked at the law firm sullivan and chr cron well. He had little espionage experience when sent off for what was a big job in switzerland. My focused shift and thought maybe there was a story on what allen was up in to world war ii. I needed a lot more information and was concerned and interested to find out what sort of subordante characters might help round out the story. Very quickly, a discovered i discovered there is a picture of allen in switzerland. You can see the alps in the background. He is accompanied by his number two in the ss bureau. Very quickly, i discovered this one. That is mary bank croft. Mary came from the sort of family dulles did. She was from boston, her father was publisher of the wall street journal, she married a figure skater who competed mt olympics but left him for what she described arnother attractin to a male. She met a swiss fellow by the name of gene and they moved to switzerland. She admitted she didnt really love gene but was really interested in his personal story. At least the story he told her. Gene claimed he was part turkish. It was entirely a lie. Mary loved the sense of dancer and adventure she imagined turkish people entailed. They moved to switzerland and mary through herself into swiss society. She had an outgoing personality and i think that times there was spark with her neighbors. The sort of reserved swiss that immediately took to her. She would soon meet there was a picture of mary in switzerland. She met a lot of notable people including the famed psychiatrist carl jung. She met him when she developed a situation where she started sneezing in awkward positions. She was very impressed by jung who cured her. She had an attraction to him, i think, and wormed her way into a group of people that sent a lot of time with him. She became pretty well known especially among americans in switzerland and they recruited her early when they saw the war was coming to do various jobs, state Department Jobs looking at german speeches and writing newspaper articles that were favorable to the american government. When dulles arrived, they introduced her to dulles and he immediately asked her to join his team and she came to sort of assume a fairly Important Role in what dulles was doing. Then veshe became dulles mistress. I thought here is a good character bringing a lot of dimension to the story and flusters it out. Then i kept looking and i came across this guy. He is a german, a hulk of a man standing six foot four. Everybody who knew him described him as being arrogant and difficult to deal with. He had risen through the German Security and police services. He had begin in the gestapo in the early days. His career in the gestapo didnt go well. He was a schemer and plotter and decided to advance his career by spreading a rumor about the head of the gestapo telling people he thought he was a communist. He was drummed out and lucky he wasnt thrown in jail. He was able to land a job in another arm of the German Intelligence Services in a group that did intelligence for the German Military. His attitude toward the german and the nazis was rapidly changing at this point. In the gestapo he had seen how nasty the nazis could be. I think also, of course, he would never admit it but i get the feeling he was just kind of pissed off his career had not gone as well as he hoped and so he began to prod against the nazis. They sent him to switzerland where he immediately reached out to the british who were very skeptical of him and he tried to establish contact with the americans who were worried. He was not a trust worthy guy. At best, he was a double agent. He quickly met dulles and dulles was willing to meet him and they developed a Good Relationship. This was perfect aside from these two characters what was good is both survived the war they wrote about their experiences. Mary wrote an autobioography which was published in the 80s and left unpublished versions at radcliffe university. Van hahn wrote an autobiography working on it during the war and what made it really interesting is it turned out mary helped him write it. The fact she did so was one of dulles schemes. He wanted to learn as much as we could so working with mary he asked her to help him translate the book and work on bits and pieces of it. He produced a very, it wasnt an entirely accurate in places, but an account of what it was like to work with dulles. At this point, there is good characters, good story, it is a good time. I just have to figure out what the narrative thread is. What is the plot to this book. There were lots of great antidotes and spy stories but i felt like they didnt link. I tried to look at dulles antipathy toward the soviets. The United States was an ally of the soviet union at this time but dulles didnt buy it and spent a lot of the war warning the United States that the soviets were not to be trusted and they were aiming to dominate europe after the wrote. I wrote the book along those lines and showed it to my editor who thought that is a good idea but maybe there is a better one looking at the activities of the resistance. I sort of did what any good author or journalists would do with the author made the suggestion i thought that cant be true. If it were good i would have thought of it. It turned out my editor was dead right. There was a really good story to tell with the resistance and the story of the resistance moved and dub tails closely with what dulles did. That sort of led us to the become that we have now. There is a picture of dulles taki taking taken about this time. He always had the pipe with him. Dulles arrived in switzerland in in november of 1942. His cover, and everybody had some cover, he traveled under his real name and everyone knew it was allen dulles but his official explanation for being in switzerland was that he was a special assistant to the american mission, american head of mission in barren. He claimed and i think correctly so he was the last american to enter switzerland before the germans sealed off the border. He was in a lot of ways marooned there during the war. He could not leave for several years and wasnt able to receive much help. A few agents were able to sneak through from italy but he didnt have great deal of interaction. This is the house he selected. He lived on the first floor which served as the office. He chose this particular location, this picture was taken, i think, around 1933 in the old quarter on a street called the harem goth. There was a busy shopping street on the end of the street so there was a lot of foot traffic going back and forth and he figured that would provide cover for people coming to visit him there at the front door. He occasionally saw what he suspected were german agents across the street monitoring the coming and going. Even better was the house, you cannot see it in the picture, but the backyard slopes down toward a river and was covered with a vineyard. A lot of contacts came up through the cover of the vineyard to knock at the backdoor and she was able to meet people that way without anybody woo was monitoring the front to know what he was up to. Dulles arrived in switzerland with some contacts. He had been in the american diplomatic core and legal profession. He knew some people and was able to look them up off the bat and found out interesting things. But it was a slow slog to build up the network that he wanted to achieve. He employed a couple techniques. One was simply to buy intelligence. Dulles bragged to everybody about how well financed he was. Word quickly got around the small town that a british agent once remarked dulles may as well put a sign on the front door saying intelligence purchased here. Another technique that dulles employed was to simply meet everybody who came along normally a station chief would show discretion before meeting somebody. Trying to feel them out and see if they were going to feed him bogus information or if they were dangerous. But not dulles. This is from a lesson he had learned during world war one. He had been in bane barren, and the phone range and somebody called up and said you need to talk to an american diplomat. Dulles later earned the person who called was vladimere lemon. He never learned what he had to say but took the lesson to his heart and talked about the importance of not prejudging anybody. So with that, dulles was able to sort of rapidly get to know people and applying his lenin principle it enabled him to meet this guy. I am sorry the picture has imperfections. His family gave it to me and it has a little wear and tear. That is a german minister of and he was a clerk but by the end of the war he became what was probably americas most important intelligence asset during the entire war. He was a dedicated antinazi and i think he also had a real taste for adventure he liked the idea of bogue a spy. This position offered him an opportunity to see a lot of top secret german documents. All three branches of the German Military would update the Foreign Ministry with what they were doing and he had an opportunity to read these documents and decide what was passed on to who. He started coming in to the Foreign Ministry on sundays when it was quiet and everybody was at home. He would take notes on these top secret documents in almost unreadable hand writing and where you can imagine the stress me was under. He started collecting the documents but didnt have anybody to give them to. He had a friend in switzerland who reached out to the brits who were not interested. The british had recently been fooled by a similar offer and lost two agents. This looked like, you know, a similar ruse and they were not going to fall for it. Cobo was able to make contact with dulles shortly after dulles arrived they had a midnight meeting in an apartment and dulles was, at first, skeptical but coba produced about 180 documents on that particular day including ones that described german codes. He talked about a german agent that was operating in ireland and one of the coolest things was map of hitlers headquarters on the eastern front. He sketched it out on a piece of paper and said here is where hitler holds his briefings. Here is the Railroad Tracks and the theater and the whole thing and you can so that little piece of paper at the National Archive up in college park. It is really cool. By the end of the war, he supplied the u. S. With about 2,000 documents and undertook tremendous risk and despite having zero training in intelligence and transporting these documents back and forth between berlin and switzerland. He originally made copies and simply tied them around his leg with twine under his pants to get them to switzerland and later developed more sophisticated techniques. But he ended up surviving and the nazis never figured him out. It was an amazing accomplishment. What really got dulles interest was the stories he was told about the german resistance and the underground. At first, dulles was suspicious of the guy who was a german agent afterall. But they were meeting together one afternoon, one evening actually, in the villa, a couple red leather chairs and they were having a drink and he reached into the his pocket and pulled out a little black book. From the become he read a top secret american cable that had recently been sent from switzerland to washington. There was no way that the germans should have been able to get their hands on this let alone been able to decipher the phot code. Dulles couldnt believe it. This is one very revealing and worrying information. With this knowledge, the americans started using the codes they knew the germans could read to send bogus information and changed it for their real correspondents. But dulles came to trust him. The fact you could read your ene enemys codes isnt something you dpifb give away. There were two resistance movements in germany. One was led by the German Military. This guy, despite his sour expression, is lewdvic beck. He had been the chief of staff of the german army until 1938 when he resigned in protest over hitlers ambitious plans. He represented a number of officers who were posed to hitler and want today do something about it. He also learned about this member of the group who was an Eternal Optimist and offset the negativity of the office core at times. He was probably too optimistic for his own good and a bit naive and it did not serve him well in the end. Members of the group worked most interestly, i think with cunaris. He is in the trench coat with the fur lining. He was the head of the military intelligence. He had started the war in the early days and was a hitler backer like a lot of people were in the early days because hitler was trying to make up were the horrible treaty of versailles. As the war went along, he began to hate the nazis and used his position to plot against the nazis and he carved out a number of important jobs for people who were trying to overthrow hitler and hatching plots against him. It is an amazing thing. Here we are in the center of r berlin and there is a nest of people trying to overthrough him. Dulles learned about the second group led my james graph motea. If there is any hard core millitarian historians out there you will recognize this being a famous name in German Military history. He was a lawyer by training and opposed the nazis from the earliest days. He setup a group called the cry battle circle. This organization was younger than the officers, eclectic, much more liberal. They initially had a lot of qualms about if it is was morally right to kill hitler. Maybe a coo would be okay. They met in small fells around german an and had discussions about what sort of economy or political system germany could have after the war. They tried to write things down to avoid security processes but they took them to the countryside when a and hid them in a beehive which i thought was genius. Dulles learns something important from both groups and that was they really wanted american help in deposing hitler. They wanted a promise from the americans that they would treat germany well after there was a coo or hitler had been replaced. They remember how horrible it was after world war one and how they were not going to risk their necks deposing hitler if he was going to do the same thing. Dulles was unable to offer those assurances and so the resistance did everything they could to try to convince the americans of their sincerity. They started by playing to dullesal well known hatred of the associate ive union. They began to supply dulles with information that suggested the russians were helping. It was legit but served their needs. Despite the fact that the United States wouldnt help them, they continued with their schemes and there were several attempts to knock off hitler that came close. Hitler had amazing instinct for avoiding assassination or a coo. There was a plot on july 22nd, 1944. This was led by a relative newcomer to the resistance. He is in the light colored jacking. He had always opposed hitler and decided the only way to get rid of him was to murder hill. Yol not go into it in great depth be