Lucy spy ring

In World War II espionage, the Lucy spy ring was an anti-Nazi operation that was headquartered in Switzerland. It was run by Rudolf Roessler, a German refugee and ostensibly the proprietor of a small publishing firm, Vita Nova. Very little is clear about the Lucy ring, about Roessler or about Lucy's sources or motives.

Roessler, a German expatriate from Bavaria who fled to Geneva when Hitler came to power, was working as a publisher at the outbreak of World War II in Switzerland, producing anti-Fascist literature. He was employed by Brigadier Masson, head of Swiss Military Intelligence, who employed him as an analyst with Bureau Ha, overtly a press cuttings agency but in fact a covert department of Swiss Intelligence. Roessler was approached by two German officers, Fritz Thiele and Rudolph von Gersdorff, who were part of a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, and had been known to Roessler in the 1930s through the Herrenklub.

Thiele and Gersdorf wished him to act as a conduit for high level military information, to be available to him to make use of in the fight against Fascism. This they accomplished by the simple expedient of equipping Roessler with a radio and an Enigma machine, and designating him as a German military station (call-signed RAHS). In this way they could openly transmit their information to him through normal channels. They were able to do this as Thiele, and his superior, Erich Fellgiebel (who was also part of the conspiracy) were in charge of the German Defence Ministry's communication centre, the Bendlerblock. This was possible, as those employed to encode the information were unaware of where it was going, while those transmitting the messages had no idea what was in them.

At first Roessler passed the information to Swiss military intelligence, via a friend who was serving in Bureau Ha, an intelligence agency used by the Swiss as a cut-out. Roger Masson (), the head of Swiss MI, also chose to pass some of this information to the British SIS. Later, through another contact who was a part of a Soviet (GRU) network run by Alexander Rado, Roessler was able to pass to the Soviet Union, recognizing the role of the USSR in the fight against Nazism. Roessler was not a Communist, nor even particularly a Communist sympathizer, and wished to remain at arms length from Rado's network, insisting on complete anonymity and communicating with Rado only through his contact, "Taylor". Rado agreed to this, recognizing the value of the information being received. Rado code-named the source "Lucy", simply because all he knew about the source was that it was in Lucerne.

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