The Defence of the Realm (59 page)

In the absence of GARBO and BRUTUS, the main double agents left to report on the impact of the V-weapons were TREASURE, TATE and ZIGZAG. TREASURE, however, was no longer trusted by B1a to transmit even under supervision.
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While TREASURE's career as a double agent was being abruptly ended,
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the Abwehr was completing final preparations forZIGZAG's return to Britain, one of his assignments being to report where V-1s were landing and the damage they caused.
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The Security Service informed Churchill that the ‘outstanding event' of the last week of June was the triumphant homecoming of ZIGZAG, who had landed by parachute in Cambridgeshire from a Junkers 88 after fifteen months of extraordinary adventures with the Abwehr:

For his sabotage of the Hatfield works (organised by us)
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and other services, he appears to have received rather more than 100,000 marks as a bonus from the Germans. Since that date he has been given an extended holiday in Norway, where he has indulged in yachting and other recreations and has successfully withstood various psychological and other tests, all of which have served to fortify German belief in him.

ZIGZAG described Berlin as a ‘complete shambles resembling the ruins of Pompeii', and German morale as visibly low. But during none of his three visits to the capital had there been an opportunity to carry out his plan to kill the increasingly reclusive Führer.
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During ZIGZAG's first month back in Britain, most of his radio messages to the Abwehr, apart from complaining about transmission problems, consisted of reports on the times and places of impact of flying bombs.
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B1a judged him ‘indispensable
to the bomb damage deception scheme'.
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The deception, however, had to be suspended on 25 July after London evening papers published maps showing where V-1s had actually fallen.
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To provide a pretext for failing to provide further reports on the flying bombs, ZIGZAG told the Abwehr that he was concentrating on trying to acquire a sample of secret equipment it had tasked him to obtain.
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For two months after the beginning of the flying-bomb offensive, the cabinet balked at a full-scale deception which would lead the Germans to believe they were overshooting and unintentionally target the south of Greater London. Though total casualties and disruption would be reduced (a claim contested by some), the deception would be directly responsible for the deaths of Londoners who would otherwise have survived. The main aim was therefore initially to prevent the Germans from improving their aim rather than to persuade them to redirect the V-1s to south London. In mid-August, however, the cabinet finally approved a deception designed to persuade the enemy to shift his aim ‘to a slight extent . . . towards the south-east'.
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By then, however, the main V-1 offensive had only a fortnight to go. On 18 August the Germans began closing down the V-1 launch sites in northern France before they were overrun by the Allied advance. The last flying bombs in the initial offensive were fired on the night of 30/31 August, nine of them hitting central London.
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The threat from the V-2 rocket missile offensive, of which intelligence had provided advance warning, was much more serious than that from the flying bombs. Unlike the V-1s, they could not be shot down before they reached their targets and worst-case forecasts of casualties by the Ministry of Home Security reached 100,000 fatalities a month (vastly more than actually occurred); in August there were mass evacuations from London.
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Guy Liddell took the threat from the V-2s so seriously that he favoured using the threat of atomic retaliation to deter Hitler from continuing with it. He noted on 25 August 1944:

I saw ‘C' [Menzies] today about the uranium [atomic] bomb and put to him the suggestion that it should be used as a threat of retaliation to the Germans if they used V.2. ‘C' said that he had no reason to think V.2 was imminent although it was possible to think that it might start in the near future. He felt however that there was nothing to be lost and that he would put this suggestion to the P.M.
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What Churchill said in reply is not recorded. V-2 attacks were more imminent than Menzies realized. The first to reach England crashed on Chiswick only a fortnight later, on 8 September. To Liddell in M15‘s St James's Street headquarters, it sounded much nearer than it was and
was followed by an echo: ‘It is said that the [V-2] fragments found at Chiswick were in part so hot you couldn't touch them and in part coated with ice. The rocket is supposed to have gone 38 miles high.'
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Liddell noted a week later: ‘V2 continues at the rate of two or three per twenty-four hours. The remarkable thing is that the explosions are heard quite definitely even when the rocket falls at a distance of up to twenty miles away.'
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Though implemented by B1a and the double agents, the deception plan designed to convince the Germans that the V-2s had overshot their targets (a more complex deception than for the V-1s, involving precise calculation of bogus timings for the hits they achieved), was devised by the Security Executive.
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After GARBO's reported arrest during his investigations of the V-1 attacks, the Abwehr decided not to take the risk of asking him to report on the V-2s. For ‘data about place and time of the explosions', it initially relied mainly on ZIGZAG
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and TATE.
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ZIGZAG's inquiries were cut short by the abrupt end of his career as a double agent. Tin-eye Stephens had great respect for ZIGZAG's bravery and nerve but regarded him as a ‘vain crook' and moral degenerate: ‘He did not blush when he related how, having infected a girl of eighteen with VD, he blackmailed her by threatening to tell her parents that she had given it to him!'
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As ZIGZAG renewed old acquaintances in the criminal underworld after his return to London, he was discovered to have bragged about the secrets of his double life to a convicted safe-breaker (as well as earlier to a girlfriend while in Norway).
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Probably the final straw came at the end of October, when he was found discussing the publication of a book of his experiences with a convicted pre-war Soviet agent, Wilfred Macartney.
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Only four months earlier the Security Service had described ZIGZAG to Churchill as one of its finest double agents. Early in November he was abruptly dismissed.
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Eddie Chapman (no longer double agent ZIGZAG) and Macartney were later fined £50 each plus expenses at a trial in camera for the breaches of the Official Secrets Act involved in the writing of Chapman's memoirs which, MI5 acknowledged in a report to Number Ten, were ‘very readable and very accurate'.
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With ZIGZAG's demise, the main role in the V-2 deception passed to TATE. The chief supporting role was taken by a new recruit to the double-agent stable: ROVER, a Polish naval officer who had joined the Abwehr in order to find an opportunity to escape to Allied territory. ROVER was probably the last Abwehr agent to arrive in England during 1944.
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Masterman wrote later: ‘What made him attractive to us was the fact that he had had a year's training in morse, the construction of wireless sets, and secret writing; we could not believe that the Germans would
lavish so much care on someone in whom they did not believe.' To the surprise and disappointment of B1a, however, the Abwehr initially failed to reply to ROVER's early transmissions. In September B1a decided to abandon the case and send ROVER to rejoin the Polish navy. ‘We were no doubt too impatient', wrote Masterman, ‘for hardly had this been done when the Germans started to call ROVER.' Further disruption followed. Though communication between ROVER and his German case officer began in October 1944, it had to be suspended in November when his B1a radio operator went into hospital and later died. Via a second radio operator early in January, ROVER explained that he had been knocked over by a lorry and spent some time in hospital, suffering from broken ribs, a dislocated collarbone and internal injuries. It was hoped that, if the Abwehr noticed the changed rhythm of his transmissions (frequently detectable when a radio operator was replaced), they would put it down to his damaged shoulder. In the event the new radio operator seems to have aroused no suspicion.
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The Security Service reported to Churchill that during January 1945:

TATE and ROVER have been successfully supplying misleading information about the fall of V.1. and V.2., and there is some reason to believe that their messages are having an effect on the places where these missiles are falling. TATE has also been used at the Admiralty for Naval deception with great success.
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Masterman wrote later:

Over a period of some months we contrived to encourage the enemy steadily to diminish his range; thus in the four weeks from 20 January to 17 February 1945 the real M.P.I. moved eastward about two miles a week and ended well outside the boundary of London region.

… A captured German map shows a schedule of results for a fortnight based on agents' reports and gives the M.P.I. in the Charing Cross area. This is, of course, exactly what we wished the enemy to believe.
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The monthly report to Churchill for February 1945 concluded:

TATE and ROVER have continued to supply misleading information about the fall of V.2 and it is now possible to conclude with some certainty that the shift to the north-east of London of the mean point of impact of V.2 is due to reports from Special Agents. The renewed use of V.1 was foreshadowed by a message sent to TATE a week before the event.
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By the time the last V-2 was launched on 27 March 1945, a total of 1,054 of the rockets had hit English targets, about half of them in Greater London.
Over 2,700 Londoners were killed.
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Later analysis for the Ministry of Home Security concluded that, if the MPI of the V-2s had not altered when it did, about 1,300 more people would have been killed and 10,000 more injured – in addition to the disruption which would have been caused to government and the economy by many more V-2s landing in the area between Westminster and the docks.
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While sending misleading reports on the V-weapons, TATE simultaneously took the lead role in the most important naval deception of the war. During 1944 German U-boats were fitted with the Schnorchel (‘nose') device, a combined air-intake and diesel gas-outlet which enabled them to remain submerged indefinitely and be virtually undetectable by radar.
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They were thus able to lie in wait for convoys in mine-free channels. In November 1944 TATE reported to his Abwehr case officer that he had learned from a Royal Navy mine-laying specialist, who sometimes spent the night at his flat, that mines of a new design were being laid near the sea bottom at depths which allowed convoys to pass over them unscathed but would trap submarines diving to avoid surface attack. The deception gained added credibility when TATE sent accurate reports of U-boat sinkings in areas where the non-existent mines had supposedly been laid.
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The Security Service informed Churchill on 19 February 1945 that TATE's deception was having ‘great success'.
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Early in March, off Fastnet, a U-boat hit a real mine which was mistaken by the Germans for one of the imaginary deep-water mines reported by TATE. As a result, U-boats were instructed to avoid an area of 3,600 square miles south-east of Fastnet.
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Masterman later concluded: ‘On a modest estimate TATE must have ensured the safety of many of our vessels which would otherwise have run considerable risks in that area, and it is not impossible that his misinformation moved U-boats from areas where they were safe to areas where they emphatically were not.'
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TATE's German controllers were so pleased with the reports which deceived them that they described him as a ‘pearl' among agents. A few hours before Hamburg fell to the Allies on 2 May 1945, his case officer appealed to him by radio to keep in touch.
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For some in the St James's Street offices of the Security Service, the final weeks of the war, when they were no longer faced with any serious threat to national security, were an anti-climax. Hugh Astor, formerly the highly motivated case officer of BRUTUS and other double agents who had played a key role, found himself becoming bored as his case-work ran down.
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So did Guy Liddell, who wrote in his diary on 4 May: ‘The end of the war is falling rather flat, and VE Day is undoubtedly going to be a colossal bore, with no food and no transport. The only thing to do is to
tie a Union Jack to the bedpost and go to bed.'
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The mood in Blenheim Palace, where most members of the Service were based, was different. On the last Sunday of the war, 6 May, the church bells, which earlier in the war were to have been the warning signal of a German invasion, rang out to celebrate victory. The double doors in the Duke's dining room were thrown open and staff allowed on to the palace terrace to listen to the bells. One member of Registry, who had ‘sweated through four years of war', recalls that for her and her colleagues it was ‘a very tremendous occasion . . . a real thanksgiving.'
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Contrary to Liddell's pessimistic expectations, ‘Victory in Europe' (VE) Day on 8 May was one of the most extraordinary national celebrations in British, especially London, history. Churchill spent the morning in bed at Number Ten preparing his great Victory broadcast, having been assured by Scotland Yard and the Ministry of Food that there was no shortage of beer in the capital –though ‘individual public houses here and there may run dry'. At 3 p.m. the Prime Minister began his broadcast, announcing the unconditional surrender of all German forces. Some from MI5's London offices were in the crowd in Parliament Square listening to the speech being relayed through loudspeakers. When Churchill spoke of ‘the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us', there was an audible gasp from the crowd. As he began his peroration, his voice broke as he declared, ‘Advance Britannia!' But it was firm and confident once more as he ended with the words: ‘Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!' Churchill made his final speech that day from the balcony of the Ministry of Health to the vast crowds thronging Whitehall, some members of MI5 again among them. ‘This is your victory,' he told them. ‘No –it is yours!' they shouted back. Churchill continued: ‘It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this!'
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