party. and it's been published in may. they weigh in on the challenges inherent to a democracy in the long road to freedom. as a look at some of the books that publishers weekly as most anticipated been published in the spring. look for these titles in bookstores and the coming spring . >> good afternoon everyone. i would like to welcome you as well as the good friends from c-span to the mcgowan theater.

as well as the producer for the noontime lecture series. before we begin today's program i would just like to remind you of a few other programs we had coming up in the near future. the irish immigrant experience. and then on wednesday march 22 film screaming -- screening. it is presented in partnership with the dc environment a film festival. to find out more about these and the other programs please take one of the monthly calendar events where you can visit our website at debbie ww .-dot archives.gov. our topic for today is agent 110. an american spy master in the german resistance of world war ii by scott miller. he is an author and former correspondent.

the first book the president in the assassin at the dawn of the american century was century was a news week using must read. he spent nearly two decades in asia and europe reporting for more than 25 countries including two postings in germany which the backdrop for "agent 110". he has appeared on the daily show with jon stewart. he also holds degrees in economics and communication. the international relations. please join me in welcoming scott miller to the national archives. >> i thought what i would do today is talk a little bit about the background behind

this book and how i came to write it and introduce you to some of the characters along the way. and described a little bit about the final product and then we will have time for questions and any comments that you have afterwards. i will readily confess that i did not set out to write this book. i was originally very interested in the early days of american's involvement in the vietnam war that whole time has always held an interest for me really right after the war the french involvement in china and also seemed like a subject that have not been done to death already. i began to do a little bit of research and i happened happen to cross these two characters. those are the dallas brothers allen dulles is in the lighter

colored jacket. he was the director of the cia during the 50s and during the time i was interested in and the gentleman in the dark suit is the older brother john ostler who was secretary of state. when i found these two guys i thought there had to be an interesting story there and it was an interesting time in american history there is two brothers and i thought there's got to be a good relationship there's got to be some good way of telling the story. i discovered pretty quickly that alan began the light colored jacket have been in switzerland during world war ii where he was a station chief for the office of strategic services. and then he was given code number 110. immediately my interest kind of perked up. i've already been a frustrated

ski mom. we lived in germany where i was newspaper correspondent and pretty much every week and that weekend that we could we would have down to switzerland and hit the slopes. and the thought of doing a book that took place in switzerland captured my imagination. he have quit that job. in the idea of the gentleman spy. it was a big job in switzerland. at that point my focus began to shift and i thought maybe there is a story really just

what to do with alan and world war ii. i need a lot more information and i was particularly concerned and interested to find out what sort of subordinate character might be there. i discovered very quickly there is a picture of alan and switzerland you can see in the background it looks like he has a tennis court there. very quickly i discovered this woman. that is mary bancroft. now mary came from the same sort of family that she was from boston. her father have been publisher of the wall street journal. she had married an american figure skating champion hood competed in the 1920 olympics. but she left him for the

purely physical attraction to another man. it turned out that she did a a real eye for the gentleman. and she ended up meeting a swiss fella and they moved to switzerland she admitted that she didn't really love jean but she was really interested in his personal story at least the story that he told her. it was entirely a lie marriott loved the source of danger and adventure that she imagined turkish people entail. they moved to switzerland where mary threw herself into the swiss society. i think there was at times a little bit of spark with her neighbors the reserved swiss the sort that immediately took

to her. but soon met a lot of notable people including the famed psychiatrist carl young. and she met him when she developed a weird affliction whereby she would start sneezing when she was an socially awkward situations. she took this two young who was able to cure her and she was very much impressed also i think she developed a little bit of a crush on him. she left a quote where she said she found him one hell of an attractive guy. she warmed her way into a group of people who spent a lot of time with young and began to study his work. she became pretty well known especially within americans in switzerland. they recruited her pretty early when they saw the war was coming to do various jobs with the state department

jobs. in writing a newspaper articles that were favorable to the american government. when dallas arrived they dulles arrived they introduced her to dallas and he immediately asked her to join his team and she came to assume a fairly important role in what dallas was doing. and then very is suitable in telling a good story she became the mistress so i thought here is a good character. she brings a lot of dimension to the story really flushes it out. and then i kept looking and i came across this guy. he is a german he is a bit of a hulk of a man. he stood 6-foot four. everybody who knew him described him as being insufferably arrogant and

difficult to deal with. he had written through the german security in place services. his career did not go very well. he was a real schemer and a plotter and he decided he could advance his career by spreading the rumor about the have of the gestapo and until people he was a communist. that didn't go over very well. he got drummed out the gestapo was actually lucky he was not thrown in jail. he was able to land a job in another arm of the german intelligence services. this group basically did intelligence for the german military. and the attitude towards the german and towards the nazis was rapidly changing at this point and he have seen how nasty the nazis could be i think also he would never admit it and i'm just

supposing here. he was just kind of pissed off that his career had not gone as well as he had hoped. so he began to plot against the nazis. they fit into switzerland where he immediately reached out to the british were very skeptical of him. and they tried to establish contact with the americans. however trustworthy guy. he was a double agent. and you don't really want to put a lot of confidence in something like that. they were willing to meet. they developed a good relationship. this is perfect. mary wrote an autobiography. she left unpublished versions

of it. they work on it during the war. and what made it really interesting was that it turned out that mary helped him write it. the fact that she did so was one of the schemes he wanted to learn as much as he could about it. and so they want to translate the book and work on bits and pieces of it. he produced not entirely accurate to places. there is a good time. there was a lot of great in a dokes in spite stories i felt like they didn't really link.

at first i tried looking at the antipathy towards soviet. they were supposed to be our friends. but they did not buy it. that the soviets weren't to be trusted and they were really in it to dominate europe after the war. i wrote some of the book along those lines. i showed it to my editor and thought that's a good idea. there is a better one looking at the activities of the resistance. i sort of did what any good author or journalist would do when editor makes a suggested i merely thought surely that can be true. my editor was dead right. there was a really good story to tell with the resistance

and best of all the story of the resistance really sort of moved. that really sort of lettuce to the book we have now. you always had to pipe with him. everybody always talked about that. he arrived in switzerland in november 1942. his cover and everybody have some sort of cover he traveled under his real name and everybody knew that it was alan bellis. but his official explanation was that he was a special assistant to the american mission in bering. he claimed in probably correctly so that he was the last american to enter switzerland before the germans sailed off the water.

and he was really in a lot of ways around there during the war. he could not leave for several years. he was able to receive much help. a few agents were able to sneak through from italy but he didn't have a great deal of interaction with them. so i was a bit difficult for him. this is the house that he and he lived on the first floor. it also served as the office. and he chose this particular location and it's in the old quarter on a street called the heron. he chose it specifically because there was a busy shopping street on the other end of that. there was a lot of foot traffic going back and forth. he figured that would provide coverage for people who were coming to visit him. at the front door. occasionally saw what they

saw. even better was that this house you can't see in this picture of the backyard slopes down gently towards the river. it was covered with the vineyard. they would come up through the coverage of the vineyard. they arrived in switzerland with some context. he had been in the american diplomatic corps they found some interesting things. to build up the kind of network that they wanted to achieve. they employed a couple of techniques. one was simply to buy intelligence.

he bragged to everybody about how well financed he was. n-word quickly got around particularly among that diplomatic and espy community. intelligence was purchased here. to simply meet everyone that came along. to try to fuel them out. where even if they were dangerous. but not dallas. and this is from a lesson that he learned during world war i. he had been in bering one sunday afternoon he was in the american mission there in the

phone rang and someone called up and said i really need to talk to an american diplomat. he loved to play tennis and he loved young ladies in the afternoon he was a tennis state with an attractive one. call back on monday. and later they learned that the person who called that day was vladimir lenin. he never learned what lund have to say but it was a lesson that he took very much to heart and he talked about that through his career about the importance of not prejudging anybody. with that he was able to rapidly get to know people and kind of applying his lenin principle it enabled him to meet this guy i'm sorry the pictures a little bit with imperfections.

it has a little bit of wear and tear over the years. that is fritz. he was a german member he became what was probably the most intelligence asset during the entire war. he was a dedicated anti- bolshevik. he also had a real taste for adventure. it offered him an opportunity to see a lot of german documents. they would update the foreign ministry with what they were doing. he and an opportunity to read these documents and what was passed on to him. he started coming into the foreign ministry on sunday and

he would take notes on these top-secret documents. most unreadable handwriting. you can imagine the stress he was under. he started collecting these documents. he didn't have anybody to give them too. he have a friend in switzerland at some point reached out to the brits who were not interested. they have recently been fueled --dash back fueled by a similar offer. this looked like a similar ruse and they were not going to fall for it. so they were able to make contact. they have a midnight meeting. in an apartment. he was at first skeptical. but he 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 the map of the headquarters on the eastern front. he sketched out that evening just a little piece of paper. here is where he holds his briefings. you can see that little piece of paper. up in at college park. it's really cool. by the end of the war. they have about 2000 documents and undertook tremendous risk and despite having zero training and intelligence in transporting these back and forth between berlin and switzerland he originally he tied the copies. he just tied them around his leg with twine under his pants to get to switzerland.

he have more sophisticated techniques. the nazis never figured him out. he ended up surviving. >> what really got him with interest though. was the stories that they told him about the german resistance in the underground. at first he was quite suspicious the guy was a german agent after all. but they were meeting together one afternoon one evening actually in the heron gaza villa. they were having a drink. and they reached into his pocket and they pulled out a little black book. and in this book he read a top-secret american cable that have 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 unable to decipher the

code. in dallas cannot believe it. this is obviously very revealing and worrying information with this knowledge of the americans started using the code they knew the germans could read to send bogus information to confuse the germans. and of course they changed it for the real correspondence. but the real importance of it was that he came to really trust him. the fact that you could read the enemies codes was not something that you give away. so what they learned was that there were two fairly distinct movements operating. this was rather despite his sour expression he had been

the chief of staff of the german army until 1938 when he resigned in protest in the ambitious plan. he represented quite a bit of. senior german officers opposed to hitler. he also learned that this character who have been mayor was member of this group. he was an internal optimist. internal optimist. he offset the cold realism. he was probably too optimistic for his own good. he was a bit naïve. he did not serve him well in the end. members of this group also worked most interestingly he is a guy with it trench coat. he was the have of the

military intelligence. he have started the war he was a backer. like a lot of people were in the early days because hitler was trying to make up for the horrible treaty. but as the work went along he really learned to hate the nazis and he began to use his position as had to plot against the nazis. the number of important jobs who were trying to overthrow hitler and hashing plots against him. it is an amazing thing. there is a little nest of people who are trying to overthrow them. really a remarkable story. they also learned about the second group which was led by

james glass. if there's any sort of hard core military historians out there. a very famous name in german military history. a lawyer by training. he opposed the nazis from the earliest day. and he set up a group called the circle. this organization was very different from the group of officers. they were younger. there were journalists the members of the foreign ministry they initially have a lot of qualms about whether it was morally right to kill hitler. it wasn't really morally correct. what sort of economy or

political system germany could have after the war. one of the really interesting things as they try to avoid writing things down for security purposes but when they didn't they took them to they hid them hit them all in a special compartment. i thought it was a great place to keep documents. they were taking a look at that. they also learned something really important from both of these groups that was that that they really wanted to have american help not so much in actually trying to kill him or any secret observation. a promise that they would treat germany while after there was a coup. they all remembered how horrible it had been after

world war i and how vindictive they felt. and they will not going to risk their next. he was unable to offer those insurances. and so the resistance and everything they could to try to convince the americans their sincerity. they were very clever. if the americans don't help us i'm sure that moscow well. they began to supply him with information which suggested that it was legitimate. it certainly served their needs. despite the fact that they would not help them. and probably there were several really interesting attempts to knock off hitler.

they came really close. and hitler have an amazing instinct for avoiding assassination. the resistance moved forward. .. .... ....

>> it was bad for hitler or bad for dulles rather. thousands of people were rounded up and hundreds executed. include many of his informants. it didn't look good for dulles. he wasn't sure where it was heading. by late 1944, he was receiving a lot of surrender letters from german officers or

representatives of them. dulles dismissed them. they were attempts by people to save their own neck. dulles wonder what would happen to his station. that changed in the first part of 1945. dulles was at home and received a phone call from a friend in swiss intelligence who said that the carl wolf, who was a general in the ss, in charge of the entire ss and italy was in switzerland and on his way to see dulles. this was pretty shocking use. wolf had a small group of people and they had reserved two cars on a regular swiss passenger train and pulled down the blinds so nobody could see them.

the trip didn't go well. an avalanche swept down on the tracks and blocked his train and he had to get out with all the members of the german team, match through the snow and get on a regular swiss passenger train where they risked being seen. he did succeed in seeing dulles that night. they met at a safe house that the oss maintained in zurich. wolf made a couple startling declarations to dulles. first that he was willing to surrender the entire ss force in italy to dulles. he also said he was buddies with field marshall albert castle ring who was in charge of the german army. this was pretty explosive stuff. they were talking about the surrender of a million men and

the end of an entire hunt. and more important from dulles and the american perspective was what it meant for fighting in the alps. in the further stages of the war, the americans convinced themselves that the germans were going to make a last final stand in the mountains of austria and italy. there was lots that suggested germans were building factories, building air conditioning in the factories and there was a special command unit being established called the werewolf. it is a great name for a commander unit. it turned out to be completely wrong. the intelligence was bogus and the americans fell for a pr

scheme that joseph thought of. it really paralyzed american thinking. the americans estimated if there was some sort of gorilla war in the alps that it could drag world war ii out by two more years. . all the advantages the military enjoyed was nullified in the mountains. when they saw an opportunity to, you know, end the fighting in italy or capture the troops that was something they had to jump on. you can see in this slide there is dulles and number two together looking at map of italy. the only problem was that the soviets found out pretty quickly that dulles was talking to senior german offices. i think it is fair to say that stalin pretty much blew a

casket. he had spent the entire war worrying that the u.s. and britain would cut a secret deal with generrmany and the three o them would gang up on him. this looked like what he had feared. what followed were weeks of bitter transmission between stalin and roosevelt where stalin accused the americans of operating behind their back and roosevelt tried to calm him down but roosevelt got irritated. they looked to the exchanges as the beginning of the cold war. another problem is wolf grossly oversold the position with dulles. finally, the head of the ss in

germany found out he had been talking to dulles and essentially took wolf's family hostage in germany and said you better bet your tail back here and we will have a serious took. wolf went back to berlin and got chewed out and their talk ended with wolf being ordered to go see hitler himself that evening. wolf left a very interesting account of going to see hitler late in the war down in the underground bomb shelter that hitler lived in. he spun a story that was part true and lies. he said i have been meeting with dulles. he figured the general germans figured that out.

bullet he said it was to cut a peace deal between the united states and he said dulles could communicate directly with roosevelt. that was hitler's main hope for how the war would end. he was nev convinced the communi communists and capitalists could get along for very long. wolf was happy to get home with his head still on his shoulders he said. he began new negotiations with dulles. those talks dragged on for several weeks. there were all sorts of misadventurestures -- misadventures and false starts.

on may 2nd, dulles was pretty fired up about the talks and he had achieved quite a feat. fortunately a lot of the accomplishments diminished when the entire german arm in europe surrenders five days later. but it was still meaningful. wolf had no doubt treated american prisoners of war better than he would have and refused to restore italian artworks and factories and it ended five days early and probably saved hundreds, if not thousands, of american lives. dulles stayed on in germany and became a station chief but his heart really wasn't in it. he kind of disagreed with

american occupation policy. the americans laid down strict rules forbidding anyone who participated with the nazis from being in the government. he wanted to make sure germany got back on its feet and was stable politically and economically. and he once said that you can't even make the train run in germany on time without the help of ex-nazis. he spent a lot of time managing the staff assigned to him and most of his attention was given to what he called the crown jewels. people why he worked with during the war and he wanted to make

sure they were well looked after. cobra was given a car and food rations and basically nobody had a car in germany right after the war so that was something. dulles eventually left germany and researched to his law practice in new york and he still was pretty much living in the past. other lawyers there said he remains very fixated on the war and spends as much time as possible reminiscing with old friends who came by. he got active on the counsel of foreign relations and used that platform to argue for treating germany well and not trying to punish it. he advised congress on establishing a new intelligence

service and replace the oss and what became the cia and became the first civilian director of the cia in 1953. that concludes my prepared remarks and i would be happy to answer any questions. if you want to ask you need to make your way to a microphone which is on either side. yes, sir? >> what happened to mary bank croft? >> i am glad you asked that question. where -- i have a bonus slide for that very question. and that is mary with her legs crossed and she is sitting with dulles' wife. clove came to switzerland and

joined dulles why the war was on. they had an unhappy marriage and clover got in his hair so he asked mary could you become buddies with my wife and take care of her? mary volunteered and clover figured out what had been going on. she told mary, you know, i know and i think the quote was like and i approve. she and mary became pals, they were very interested in jung and studies his writings and mary wrote about trips together and all the horrible things they could see in germany.

long after the war, mary moved to new york and continued to study and wrote books and she wrote some articles. she seemed like an interesting character and someone interested in her own skin and always spoke her mind. anyone else? >> the station chief, you mentioned the germans were outside, did people know his actual role? how long did it take?

>> it didn't take them long to figure out he was in germany. there was a newspaper article written and it says allen dulles is here. he is a well known diplomat and the newspaper article said he was a special advisory for roosevelt. dulles was horrified there was a newspaper article about him but he realized if people want to believe that i will let them.

he said in switzerland and here on roosevelt's behalf and we think he is really most interested in the german economy and gathering intelligence. it was very late in the war bf they figured out he was ofs. they really clung to the mistaken identity. they knew he was doing espionage but didn't know that much about his network. there was a report the germans did in the summer of 1944 and they mentioned dulles as somebody who had been working with the german resistance.

>> how did get dulles get the information back to the united states so they could use it? >> that was a huge problem. they would smuggle it out of the-country to france and spain that were neutral but that didn't work well. they would transmit some things over the telephone. they knew the swiss intelligence service was monitoring their phones and the swiss monitored everybody's. they were willing to look it

other way about the spies in their country but wanted to know what was going on. there were some in the service pro-american and some pro-german. dulles used simple codes and there were part a number of air crew that found their way to switzerland and maybe they crashed along the border and snuck in and the swiss wouldn't return them to the u.s. later in

the war, they were getting a lot of microfilm and secret documents from germany and they condensed a railroad engineer who went between convinced them to build a special compartment on the train. if the train was insected, theconductor could hit the lever and whatever was in there would fall into flames and be incinerated. those documents went to france and were met by the french underground who bicycled it down to the mediterranean and they

took it by boat to be flown to london and on to washington. they did it with the documents that were difficult to tra transcribe and when they wanted to send the originals. >> besides hitler's intutitian -- intuition discover why there was no assassination attempt? >> the guys, if you got caught, and all of them did at one point, you were looking at a grisly death. hitler, it is inexplicitable. there is an individual in the book i talk about who was in 1939 he invented a plot where he

was going to blow hitler up. this story guy illustrates how lucky hitler was. he was going to blow up this beer hall that hitler was speaking in. the guy was engen. he was able to steal dynamite used for the bomb and made an accurate timing device and he knew the date and time hitler was going to be speaking in this beer hall. so you would go into the beer hall at night, hide in the bathroom and come out with a tool box and carved out a hollow in the support post on the platform where hitler was going to speak, put the bomb in there and everything worked perfectly but on that particular night there was bad weather in the

munich area and hitler's team said i don't think we can fly and he called off the speech early. 10-15 minutes early. the bomb went off as timed exactly with a tremendous explosion and kill a number of people when the roof collapsed. hitler would have been killed but it was just a matter of bad derth. faith. anybody else? >> do you have a sense if july 20th or the other plots against hitler would have succeeded would that have ended the war? >> i think, yeah, i am sure so.

because the people who wanted to replace hitler were very seen to end the war. i think they probably despite the protests from roosevelt and this is the fun of history playing the what if game. but i think that the americans, if hitler had been replaced and a new german government came and said let's quit this is it hard to imagine in the american government to turn too cold a shoulder to those kinds of officers. it is hard to imagine otherwise. >> you think it would be something other than considerational surrender? >> i think what the wink and nudge was was telling the

germans it was america's policy we will not negotiate with you. i think politically how could you continue with the war if you people saying we got rid of hitler, he hate them and want to be your friend. how do you say we will fight you until the bitter end? it is hard to imagine otherwise. >> all right. thank you so much, everybody. [applause] >> just a reminder there is a

book signing one level up. 15% off on lecture day. make sure you get your book. >> here is a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals. on april 8th, live at the annapolis book festival with topics on politics, income inequality, and criminal injustice. and that day talking author talks at the san antonio book festival. and then live from the los