Would You Believe?

A MAN CALLED LUCY by Pierre Accoce and Pierre Quef. 250 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.

Would you believe: That during World War II the Allies were warned weeks in advance of the blitzkrieg invasions of Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark? That Stalin received a verbatim plan of "Operation Barbarossa"--the crushing German push into Russia--more than a month before it happened? And that nobody in Moscow or The Hague or Whitehall or Washington did anything about those warnings?

Any reader of World War II history might well be excused for skepticism. Yet this book, written by two reputable French journalists after 21 years of assiduous research, claims that all of those revelations were indeed made--and disregarded. The man who ferreted out that information and relayed it to the Allies was a studious, skeletal German refugee-journalist-publisher named Rudolf Roessler, code-named "Lucy," who according to the authors was the most influential--and ignored--spy of World War II.

Fraternity Hatred. Roessler, a rightist-imperialist German intellectual who fought in World War I and afterward maintained his dedication to a reasonable Germany, fled to Switzerland in 1934, but not before cementing an anti-Nazi friendship with ten high-ranking comrades in the Wehrmacht. Sharing with them the military fraternity's hatred of Korporal Adolf Hitler, Roessler agreed to serve as an out-of-country transmitter for every bit of intelligence that the ten could sneak out of Germany in the event of war. At the same time, he promised his friends that he would not disclose their identities to any Allied source. The ten--whom the authors refuse to identify even now, supposedly out of fear of neo-Nazi reprisals--were on the staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Army General Staff), and had supplied Roessler with codes, call signs, and the latest-model radio transceiver in the German electronics inventory.

According to Authors Accoce and Quet, Roessler first tried to feed his inside dope to Britain, France and the U.S., but was not believed because he would not admit to his source. Then began a liaison with Moscow's MGB--known to him as "the Center." Stalin at first ignored Roessler's pipeline poop on "Barbarossa." But when the Germans invaded as advertised, the Center quickly began paying Roessler $1,600 a month for everything he could transmit.

Messages to Moscow. It was Roessler's inside information, according to the authors, that allowed Soviet Marshals Zhukov, Rokossovski and Eremenko to draw the Wehrmacht into the encirclement of Stalingrad and thus turn the tide of the war in the East. Roessler also provided Russian propagandists with information--direct from Hitler's headquarters--that was used over loudspeakers to break the German resistance: "Panzer grenadiers of the 24th, we shall not be south of Voronezh the day after tomorrow as your leaders have assured you. Save your bread, your ammunition and your gasoline. The luckiest will be those who have kept a bullet to blow their brains out." After also relaying information about such things as the July 20 plot against Hitler and the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets, Roessler ultimately became the prey of the Gestapo, which stumbled onto his existence by intercepting his radio messages to Moscow. Fortunately, the Gestapo had not intercepted the radio messages from the ten OKW officers, and so they remained undetected throughout the war. But Gestapo Boss Walter Schellenberg zeroed in on Roessler in Switzerland, and only dodging by the Swiss--who knew about Roessler and tolerated him--kept Nazi agents from nailing him.

After the war, the Swiss themselves took revenge for the embarrassment Roessler had caused them: when he was accused of spying on NATO for the Russians, the Swiss government locked Roessler up for one year. Virtually penniless, he died in 1958; his death went unremarked by the Allies he had tried to serve. Yet the facts of his ring's existence and its ways of operating, as reported by Authors Accoce and Quet, are grudgingly accepted as true by Swiss, West German and British intelligence personnel. Even Allen Dulles, who operated for the OSS in Switzerland during the war, acknowledges Roessler as a "fantastic source." He was that and much more--but the code on his motivation has yet to be broken.

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