Fighting to Lose (22 page)

After preparations that Folmer found alarmingly careless, the mission began, only immediately to run aground when the boat got stuck in mud in the harbour. When they tried again a week later, a German officer in full uniform arrived to oversee their departure, making it obvious to everyone within sight what was going on. Folmer became very, very nervous; it would be the kiss of death if any of the watching Frenchmen was in contact with Britain. Happily for him, the boat’s engine broke down and the trip was aborted once more. Folmer then sent a polite note to Major Klug saying that the mission was hopelessly compromised and he wanted no further part in it. To his surprise, he was suddenly arrested and spent the next nine weeks in a Brussels jail.9

The intention of these antics can only be guessed at. Their effect, in any case, was to contribute to MI5’s impression that its Abwehr opponent was hopelessly incompetent. This lulled it into complacency.

Folmer was doubly lucky. Not only did he miss out on a voyage that would have put him on the bottom step of the scaffold, but his former boss, Oscar Reile of the Abwehr’s Abt IIIf counter-espionage section, obtained his release and brought him to Paris. There for the next four years he worked undercover against the French Resistance with deadly effect.

As for Major Klug, he went on to carry out a similar caper with eight enthusiastic foreign-born Nazis who were to sabotage Swiss airfields while pretending to be on a holiday walking tour. Dressed identically in plus-fours and wearing the same brown shoes, and with capes made from Luftwaffe field grey, they stood out in the Alps like a parody of the von Trapp family from
The Sound of Music
. On being stopped, they had no identity papers, were each carrying a brand-new Swiss one hundred–franc note, and had in their satchels their hiking refreshments, a revolver, and explosives. All were imprisoned.10

Major Klug — whose name is the German word for “clever” — appears to have been engaged in some gratuitous mischief against the Nazis.

With the exception of the groups from Ast Brussels, all the spies captured by the British between September 1940 and the following March were linked directly or indirectly to Major Ritter, and had identity papers that were obviously flawed and traceable to the names and numbers provided by BISCUIT and by SNOW.11 The errors varied, but were always glaring. A 1942 British intelligence report described them as follows:

(I) National Registration Identity Cards are usually forged, and the following typical errors are noticeable:

(a) Address is written in continental instead of English style.

(b) Cards are dated prior to 1.5.40, which is the date by which completion was officially ordered.

(c) The use of initials rather than full Christian names.

(d) Christian names are placed before surnames.

(e) Both halves of the right-hand page of the card have been known to be written in the same hand, whereas in a genuine card they are in different hands.

(2) Ration books are usually forged and there is a preference for Travellers’ Ration Books.

(3) In one case a passport was not only falsely filled in, but lacked a visa for this country and the Immigration Officer’s stamp.

(4) The numbers of English bank notes frequently run consecutively and consecutive numbers have been found in the possession of different agents.12

These are all primitive mistakes that would not have been made by an organization like the Abwehr’s documents division, which maintained a library of identity papers from every country in Europe, and which had the capacity to imitate every ink, every type of paper, and every stamp and seal.13 Moreover, Ritter had lived in the United States for years, and his deputy, Karl Kramer, in Britain. They would have been aware of the differences between English and European writing styles, and never would have allowed a Continental flourish on the numeral
1
of a supposedly British document. They also would have appreciated that if one wanted to get the average policeman in rural Britain to spot a forged document, the errors had to be obvious.14

Caroli and Schmidt began sending their messages in mid-September and mid-October 1940 respectively. By then it was obvious to all that the anticipated cross-Channel invasion was not going to happen, at least not that year. The need for them to report on troop movements and ground defences evaporated, although this was never their intended espionage mission anyway. Despite claiming to their British captors that they were the vanguard of invasion, both had been trained, not by the air or army sections of Ast Hamburg, but by Abw I Wi, the section that specialized in economic intelligence.15

One can see the reasoning. Canaris did not want Hitler to defeat Britain,16 so he needed to be able to gauge the state of British civilian morale in the face of the bombings and the ongoing submarine blockade in the North Atlantic. To measure that, the Abwehr required current data on consumer prices, on food and fuel shortages, and on public reaction to the lives lost to the bombings and sinkings. This was how to determine Britain’s continued willingness to fight. SNOW, at Hamburg’s request, began sending such information in mid-August; this, and the weather observations, became the principal themes of TATE’s messages from mid-1941 on,17 all approved and composed by MI5.

Naturally, Ast Hamburg’s agent controllers asked repeatedly for military information, for it fed the illusion that they believed that Owens, Caroli, and Schmidt were at liberty. They also knew that anything provided by these agents would be concocted by the British. What they might not have expected, however, was that they, along with the routine reports on prices and morale, would often be given tactical information that was accurate and valuable. Robertson, backed by Liddell, had got it into his head that his double agents had to send as much high-quality intelligence as possible in order to retain German confidence. The better the information, the reasoning went, the more certain the Germans would be fooled.

First, there were the bomb-damage reports. The long lists of factories destroyed and communications damaged that were wirelessed to Hamburg must have been tremendously encouraging to Göring. The devastation caused by the big raids on London, Liverpool, Coventry, Birmingham, and Manchester were covered in detail.

Second, SNOW and TATE volunteered target identification that seems to have cut very close. The following two messages were received by Abw I Luft/E in Berlin.

LENA 3725 reports on 17.11.40 at 00.44 hours Number 14

[Translations]

The Nash and Thompson factory of Tolworth (Surrey) is situated near the Kingston Bypass inside where Hook Road, Ewell Road and the bypass intersect. The factory is closely guarded and camouflaged. No chance of finding out what is made there because people refuse to talk about it.

3504 reports on 23.11.40

The Nash and Thompson factory is 100 yards south of the Kingston Bypass exactly between where Hook Road and Ewell Road cross the Bypass. Gun turrets are made there.18

The SNOW message was right. Again, though, Owens was not the author of this message; MI5 was. The company was the principal manufacturer of the multiple-gun, hydraulically operated turrets for British bombers, and for making revolving platforms for radar.

The Luftwaffe followed up with aerial photographs and air attacks, mostly missing the factory but doing a lot of damage to the surrounding town of Surbiton.

It is true that Nash and Thompson was well-known as a manufacturer of aircraft components before the war, and could have been assumed to be a listed target anyway. Perhaps the factory had shifted its production elsewhere. Nevertheless, if MI5 — Robertson, presumably with permission from higher authority — did indeed authorize the transmission of this information, it is hard to understand why they would want to draw the bombers onto this particular target, especially as it was located in a built-up area.

Another SNOW message, delivered just at this time, is even more difficult to explain:

To: Abw Luft Luft/E

Message from 3504 on 23.11.40

[Translation]

In Egypt no Spitfires; however, some Blenheims. Some machines should be on the way to Egypt. Details difficult to obtain.

This was valuable intelligence. At the time, Hitler was making arrangements to send help to North Africa, where the Italian air force and their obsolete aircraft were being badly shot up by the RAF flying out of Egypt. The German Bf-109 was recognized as outclassing every British fighter except the Spitfire, and planes arrived in Libya in time for the German counterattack that April. About 1,400 British fighters were shot down by Bf-109s before Spitfires were released to the Middle East in mid-1942.19

The documents in the MI5 files that would have described how these messages were prepared, and whether Commodore Boyle cleared them, have not been found. Only the German versions of the messages survive, in the records of Nest Bremen that were captured by the British and shared briefly with the U.S. Navy at the end of the war.20

What is known, however, is that the questionnaire Caroli had on him when he landed sparked a dispute between MI5 and the director of military intelligence. The Germans wanted Caroli to report on certain land defences in the New Romney area (Kent), which was not information that could be obtained without applying to the intelligence section of the commander-in-chief, Home Forces. This triggered the DMI’s attention and his immediate reaction was refusal. He wanted Caroli used to pass over false information, not true.

Again, no contemporary documents that reflect this controversy have been located, so one must rely for details on an unsigned, undated internal MI5 description, obviously written many years later by a participant in the events. Apparently, there was disagreement as to both aim and method: “[T]hese officers were inclined to view the problem from the angle of what they wanted to tell the enemy, rather than from that of what the agent could actually see or learn.…” Or, further: “… what additional things he would clearly have to see if he were to purport to see something they wanted to put over….”21

Arguing that the threat of invasion made England a “theatre of operations,” the DMI tried to talk his fellow directors of intelligence into setting up a special joint committee called the Wireless Section to manage the deceptive information the double agents were to transmit. The unknown author of the MI5 paper commented:

[I]t is not unamusing that the function of the W-Section was defined as the “collecting, handling and disseminating of F.I. (False Information)”: DMI had not yet appreciated that that body would spend far more time “collecting, handling and disseminating” true information in order to build the agents to enable them to put over the false information.

In this regard, MI5 had its champion in Commodore Boyle, the director of Air Intelligence, who “courageously chanced his arm” by approving disclosures pertaining to the other services.22 He put forward the counter-proposal that the service directors of intelligence themselves form an informal committee — the Wireless Board — which would give authority and a modicum of direction to an operations committee of staff intelligence officers who would actually oversee what information to give the enemy. This became the XX Committee, the Roman numerals for 20 being two Xs.

To keep the purpose and discussions of the Wireless Board “super-secret,” it was decided that the directors of intelligence would inform their individual chiefs of staff of what was discussed or decided only verbally, if at all. Minutes would be taken, but only the chairman, General Davidson, would get a copy. There would be no document distribution except under exceptional circumstances.