Far Eastern correspondent for two leading Nazi publications—Der
Angriff and the Völkischer Beobachter—Lissner established useful
contacts among Japanese intelligence and army officers. The dis-
covery of his father’s Jewish ancestry in 1939, however, led to his
arrest by the Gestapo and a ban on his publishing career. While he
had rejected an earlier recruitment attempt, Lissner now agreed to
work for the Abwehr (code name ivar) on the condition that his
parents be allowed to leave Germany. Based in Harbin, Manchuria,
his intelligence network stretched to eastern Siberia and included
a broad range of human sources. Abwehr head Wilhelm Canaris
extolled his “extraordinarily comprehensive” reports—more than
200 had been submitted by spring 1943—as the only reliable
source of information on Asiatic Russia, especially the border
region with Manchuria.
Yet Lissner also had detractors who repeatedly sought his re-
moval, above all Josef Meisinger, the Gestapo official assigned to
the German embassy in Tokyo. When Lissner provided details of
Meisinger’s failure to detect the successful penetration by Richard
Sorge, the police attaché took revenge, and Lissner was arrested on 4
June 1943 by Japanese military police, suspected of espionage on be-
half of the Soviet Union. Released from prison after the war, Lissner
returned to Germany and resumed his career as a writer. He died in
September 1967 in Cheières-sur-Ollon near Montreux, Switzerland.
His autobiography Mein gefährlicher Weg (My Dangerous Path) ap-
peared posthumously in 1975.LITHIA. The first major counterintelligence success of the Organisa-
tion Gehlen (OG), Operation lithia was authorized in November
1947 as a joint endeavor with U.S. Army Intelligence. Its target was
the Kundermann Ring, a large-scale Czechoslovakian spy network
that had infiltrated certain émigré espionage groups managed by
the United States and Great Britain. On 8 November 1948, the OG
helped bring about the defection of two leading Czech military intel-
ligence officers based in Karlovy Vary—Ottokar Fejfar and Vojtech
Jarabek—which quickly led to the arrest of 18 agents. A further 28
persons were placed under surveillance. In the trial held three months
later, an American military court sentenced the key member of the
ring, Jaromir Koska, to 20 years of hard labor.
LITHIA • 269