Free Hitler's Spy Chief by Richard Bassett

Meanwhile, he added to these contacts a plan for joint police cooperation between Germany and Spain. He later negotiated this in detail with the minister of the interior, Martinez Anido. Without exception all these men would, in ten years time, be key advisers to one young officer whom Canaris at this stage had not yet met but who would dominate his country for decades to come: Francisco Franco.
    Meanwhile, commercial projects came hand in glove with military cooperation. A Spanish airline was established as a joint venture with Luft-Hansa. Banking and insurance joint ventures followed. Moreover, Canaris did not limit his activities to Spain but exploited that country’s links with Latin America to push for similar ventures in Argentina – another attack on, at that time, a diminishing but still important bastion of British capital influence. 11
    Unsurprisingly, in this ever more successful career, Canaris made enemies who, allied to his old foes on the left of German politics, began to counter attack. In this they were helped by the spectacular bankruptcy of one of Lohmann’s most adventurous business forays, the film maker Phoebus. Lohmann’s health had begun to deteriorate as he failed to keep track of the finances of the many-headed monster he had created. As one shell company after another required the discipline of detailed and regular audit, Lohmann adopted the tactics of a hunted man: he kept on the move. From train to motor-car to aeroplane; dictating the odd memo to bewildered subordinates, he found the only way to deal with the labyrinth he had created was to avoid dealing with it.
    Unfortunately, when Phoebus collapsed, the left wing press all too easily found evidence that it had been a pack of cards constructed on the firm but secret foundation of Admiralty funds. Die Weltbühne , the newspaper that had had Canaris in its sights over the Liebknecht affair, now returned to the charge. Canaris, though largely innocent in the case of Phoebus, was brought back from Spain, questioned and given a posting in Wilhelmshaven, miles away from the spotlight in Berlin. The defence minister, Gessler, was forced to resign and was replaced by General Groener, whose thorough investigation exonerated Canaris while at the same time making the awful discovery that no less than twenty-six billion marks had been lost in one way or another through Lohmann’s ‘investments’.
    To move from key negotiator on cutting edge naval technology with the King of Spain and other senior figures to a relatively insignificant backwater, surrounded by out of date ships of no serious strategic value, cannot have been easy. Canaris had the satisfaction of knowing that the work he had initiated in Spain would continue, and that the contacts he had begun between the German naval intelligence and the important organs of Spain would not be lost. There were, however, attempts – as some partly burnt secret documents from the German foreign ministry reveal – to bring Canaris back to Spain. On the recommendation of theretired naval officer Captain Messerschmidt, a German secret agent in Spain, the German ambassador Welczek wrote to the Reichswehr minister, noting Canaris’ good relationship with the King and the ‘great confidence he enjoys with other important personalities in Spain’. However, both Admiral Raeder, the new head of the navy, and the minister were determined ‘on account of the sensitive themes’ surrounding Canaris to keep him well away from Spain. 12
    Raeder also knew that as far as the prying eyes of a hostile German press were concerned there was no safer place than a life on the ocean wave. There now began two years of’conventional’ naval service for Canaris as first officer on board the training cruiser Schlesien , a ship built long before the war and indeed already obsolete by 1914.
    Judging by the correspondence of the next two years, these conventional duties were