Lucy spy ring

In World War II espionage, the Lucy spy ring was an anti-German operation which operated in Switzerland. It was run by Rudolf Roessler, a German refugee, who was ostensibly the proprietor of a small publishing firm, Vita Nova. Very little is publicly clear about the Lucy ring, about Roessler, or about its actual sources or motives.

Long after the war, in the 1960s, Roessler offered a somewhat obscure account in interviews with journalists. According to that account, he left several (a small number, perhaps up to 10) anti-Nazi friends behind in Germany when he moved to Switzerland in the early 30s. Among them were several officers in the German military, who reached high staff positions during the War. Somehow—and this is one of the most obscure parts of this account—they were able to transmit information to him (sometimes by his specific request, relayed from Moscow) using major German military transmitters. The implication apparently intended is some sort of clandestine, never noticed by the Germans, "piggybacking" on German transmissions. This is technically rather more than unlikely and thus not very credible. But, however that may be, the information provided was frequent, accurate, and timely.

Roessler managed to make contact with Alexander Rado's Soviet espionage organization in Switzerland and used it to pass information to Moscow. His required conditions for working for Rado were very odd—he was never to be forced to disclose his sources, and the Soviets were to make no attempt to discover them. Moscow Centre was initially quite suspicious, but eventually came to rely on his ring's information. The Swiss eventually tracked down the transmitters and put the Lucy ring out of business before the end of the War. Alexander Foote, later author of the controversial "Handbook for Spies", was one of Rado's (and Roessler's) radio operators and one of those arrested.

An additional controversial aspect of the Lucy ring story is the allegation that it was, at its heart, a British Secret Service operation intended to get Ultra information to the Soviets in a convincing way untraceable to British codebreaking operations against the Germans. Stalin had shown considerable suspicion of any information from the Americans or British about German plans to invade Russia in 1941, so an Allied effort to find a way to get helpful information to the Soviets in a form that would not be dismissed is, at least, not implausible. That the Soviets had, via their own espionage operations, learned of the British break into important German message traffic was not, at the time, known to the British. Various observations have suggested that Alexander Foote was more than a mere radio operator:

* he was in a position to act as a radio interface between SIS and Roessler, and also between Roessler and Moscow;
* his return to the West in the 50s was unusual in several ways;
* his book is similarly troublesome;
* not one of Roessler's claimed "sources" in Germany has been identified (or come forward).

So, some suspicion has developed that, even more than for most espionage operations, the Lucy ring was not what it seemed.

Further reading

* Accoce, Pierre, and Pierre Quet. A. M. Sheridan Smith (trans.). "A Man Called Lucy; 1939–1945". New York: Coward-McCann, 1967.
* Read, Anthony, and David Fisher. "Operation Lucy: Most Secret Spy Ring of the Second World War." New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981. ISBN 069811079X.
* [http://militera.lib.ru/memo/other/rado_s/index.html Rado’s memories 'Pod Psevdonimom "Dora"'] (in Russian)