In late 1943, with the help of von Trott, Erich Vermehren was assigned to the Abwehr, given two weeks’ training in the use of wireless codes and secret inks, and then deployed to Istanbul as personal assistant to Paul Leverkühn, a friend and legal colleague of his father from Lübeck. Officially, wives were not allowed to accompany their husbands on diplomatic postings, to discourage any possibility of defection. Elisabeth, already a marked woman, remained in Berlin, in effect held hostage. Vermehren arrived in Istanbul in early December, and began work at the Abwehr office under Leverkühn. Two weeks later, he again made contact with British intelligence; Harold Gibson of MI6 passed his name on to Section V; Kim Philby’s Iberian section flagged up his earlier approach in Lisbon; the Vermehren file was forwarded to Elliott in Istanbul, and the wheels began to turn.
On 27 December 1943, at seven in the evening, Erich Vermehren made his way to an address in the İstiklal Caddesi, the main street of Pera. A servant with a strong Russian accent answered the door to the apartment, showed the young German into the sitting room, and handed him, unbidden, a large Scotch. A few moments later, a lanky, bespectacled man emerged from behind a sliding door, and stuck out his hand with a friendly grin. ‘Erich Vermehren?’ he said. ‘Why, I believe you were coming up to Oxford.’ Nicholas Elliott had done his homework.
Vermehren vividly recalled that moment, and Elliott’s unmistakable, reassuring Englishness. ‘I had a sense of tremendous relief. I felt almost as if my feet rested already on English soil.’
The two men talked while Elizabeth Elliott served dinner, and they continued talking through the night. Vermehren explained that he was anxious to strike a blow against Hitler, but agonised at the thought that he might be betraying his country. He insisted he could not leave without his wife, who would certainly be arrested and probably killed if he defected. Elliott detected ‘signs of instability’ in the young man: he coaxed and cajoled him; he summoned Elizabeth to stress the moral responsibility incumbent on Vermehren through his Catholic faith; he explained that it would take some time to arrange the false paperwork, but when the moment was right he would spirit the Vermehrens out of Turkey, and bring them safely to Britain. Vermehren’s defection, Elliott promised, would strike a devastating blow to Nazism. When the German still hesitated, Elliott’s voice took on a harder edge. Vermehren was in too deep to back out now. As dawn broke over Istanbul, Vermehren rose to his feet, and shook Elliott’s hand. He would do what Elliott, and God, required of him.
In his report to MI6, Elliott described Vermehren as ‘a highly strung, cultivated, self-confident, extremely clever, logical-minded, slightly precious young German of good family’, who was ‘intensely anti-Nazi on religious grounds’. Elliott was ‘fully convinced’ of Vermehren’s sincerity.
Vermehren flew back to Berlin and told his wife to prepare for the moment they had long discussed. Von Trott had arranged a job for her at the German embassy in Istanbul, where her cousin, Franz von Papen, was the German ambassador. This might provide some protection if the Gestapo demanded to know how husband and wife had travelled abroad together in violation of the rules. Elisabeth divided her bank accounts among her siblings, and the Vermehrens set off by rail for Istanbul. But as the train trundled through Bulgaria they learned, to their horror, that the man occupying the wagon-lit compartment next door was a Gestapo officer. They were already under surveillance. Sure enough, at the Bulgarian border, Elisabeth was arrested and taken to the German embassy in Sofia. Erich had no choice but to continue on to Istanbul alone. After a wait of two weeks, again with the help of Adam von Trott, Elisabeth wangled her way onto a courier plane to Istanbul, and was finally reunited with her husband. Leverkühn knew Frau Vermehren was on the Gestapo blacklist, and he was distinctly alarmed to find her turning up, unannounced, in his city; he instructed Vermehren to write a memo to Berlin explaining exactly how, and why, his wife had come to Istanbul.
The Vermehrens had to move fast, and so did Elliott. Under the pretence of familiarising himself with the office paperwork, Vermehren began extracting what seemed to be the most important Abwehr files, including an organogram of ‘the complete Abwehr setup in Istanbul’ and a ‘quantity of detailed information’ about Abwehr operations in the Near and Middle East. These were photographed by Elliott, and then returned to the Abwehr office by Vermehren. Leverkühn gave his new assistant full access to the files, and Vermehren was soon passing on huge quantities of information every night. But time was running out. On 25 January, one of Elliott’s informants in the Turkish police tipped him off that they knew Vermehren was in contact with the British; Leverkühn had his own police spies, and ‘it would not be long, therefore, before the Germans got wind’ of what was afoot.
Two days later, Erich and Elisabeth Vermehren attended a cocktail party at the Spanish embassy. As the couple left the building, they were seized by two men and bundled into a waiting car. The scene was stage-managed by Elliott to make it appear that they had been kidnapped, in order to buy time and perhaps limit reprisals against their families. The Vermehrens were driven southeast to the coast near Smyrna, transferred to a fast motor launch, which then accelerated into the Mediterranean darkness. Twenty-four hours later they were in Cairo, still wearing their party clothes.
Paul Leverkühn reacted to the Vermehrens’ disappearance with bafflement, followed by anger, and then sheer, paralysing panic. The Abwehr chief, MI6 reported happily, was in ‘a hell of a flap’. Von Papen cut short a skiing holiday in the Bursa Mountains to take personal command of the crisis, and demanded that the Turkish police track down the fugitives. The Turks politely agreed to help, and did nothing at all. Leverkühn was ordered back to Berlin. As the Germans scoured Istanbul, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hitler’s brutal security chief, gave orders that the Istanbul Abwehr be thoroughly investigated and purged, since more enemy spies must be lurking there. He was right. Several of Luverkühn’s colleagues now also decided to bolt. Karl Alois Kleczkowski, a forty-three-year-old journalist who had worked as a German propagandist and rumour-collector for the Abwehr, went into hiding in a safe house on the city’s outskirts. Wilhelm Hamburger, the heir to an Austrian paper fortune, was one of Leverkühn’s most trusted deputies. Posing as a flax buyer, he had spent much of the war gathering intelligence on the Middle East, while seldom leaving his table at the Park Hotel. He was also in touch with the Allied intelligence services. On 7 February he was woken by two German officers and told he was under arrest. Hamburger asked if he could call his most important Turkish agent ‘lest his disappearance provoke controversy’.
Bizarrely, he was allowed to do so: Hamburger dialled a prearranged number, got through to his OSS contact, and uttered the following words: ‘I am going to Berlin for a week and will be back. Tell it to the Marines.’ (Slang for nonsense.) Half an hour later, with Hamburger still packing and stalling, a car pulled up outside his house. Hamburger raced out of the front door before his captors could stop him, jumped in the back seat, and was driven at high speed to the British consulate, where ‘he was given breakfast and a new identity’. The two defectors followed the Vermehrens’ secret escape route to Egypt. Packy Macfarland of OSS sent a jubilant message to Washington, reporting that Cairo was in danger of being ‘swamped by an invasion of evaders and turncoats’. Kaltenbrunner conveyed the bad news to Hitler: Vermehren’s defection had ‘gravely prejudiced the activities not only of the Abwehr-Istanbul but of our other military agencies in Turkey. The entire work of the Abwehr station has been exposed and its continuation seems impracticable.’