4
FOREIGNERS HAVE SPIES; BRITAIN HAS MILITARY Intelligence. As if that were not euphemism enough, it is abbreviated to MI. In 1940, MI was part of the War Office. It was spreading like crab grass at the time—not surprisingly—and its different sections were known by numbers: MI9 ran the escape routes from prisoner-of-war camps through Occupied Europe to neutral countries; MI8 monitored enemy wireless traffic, and was of more value than six regiments; MI6 sent agents into France.
It was MI5 that Professor Percival Godliman joined in the autumn of 1940. He turned up at the War Office in Whitehall on a cold September morning after a night spent putting out fires all over the East End; the blitz was at its height and he was an auxiliary fireman.
Military Intelligence was run by soldiers in peacetime, when—in Godliman’s opinion—espionage made no difference to anything anyhow; but now, he found, it was populated by amateurs, and he was delighted to discover that he knew half the people in MI5. On his first day he met a barrister who was a member of his club, an art historian with whom he had been to college, an archivist from his own university, and his favorite writer of detective stories.
He was shown into Colonel Terry’s office at 10 A.M. Terry had been there for several hours; there were two empty cigarette packets in the wastepaper basket.
Godliman said, “Should I call you ‘Sir’ now?”
“There’s not much bull around here, Percy. ‘Uncle Andrew’ will do fine. Sit down.”
All the same, there was a briskness about Terry that had not been present when they had lunch at the Savoy. Godliman noticed that he did not smile, and his attention kept wandering to a pile of unread messages on the desk.
Terry looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to put you in the picture, briefly—finish the lecture I started over lunch.”
Godliman smiled. “This time I won’t get up on my high horse.”
Terry lit another cigarette.
CANARIS’S SPIES in Britain were useless people (Terry resumed, as if their conversation had been interrupted five minutes rather than three months ago). Dorothy O’Grady was typical—we caught her cutting military telephone wires on the Isle of Wight. She was writing letters to Portugal in the kind of secret ink you buy in joke shops.
A new wave of spies began in September. Their task was to reconnoiter Britain in preparation for the invasion—to map beaches suitable for landings; fields and roads that could be used by troop-carrying gliders; tank traps and road blocks and barbed-wire obstacles.
They seem to have been badly selected, hastily mustered, inadequately trained and poorly equipped. Typical were the four who came over on the night of 2–3 September: Meier, Kieboom, Pons and Waldberg. Kieboom and Pons landed at dawn near Hythe, and were arrested by Private Tollervey of the Somerset Light Infantry, who came upon them in the sand dunes hacking away at a dirty great wurst.
Waldberg actually managed to send a signal to Hamburg:
ARRIVED SAFELY. DOCUMENT DESTROYED. ENGLISH PATROL 200 METERS FROM COAST. BEACH WITH BROWN NETS AND RAILWAY SLEEPERS AT A DISTANCE OF 50 METERS. NO MINES. FEW SOLDIERS. UNFINISHED BLOCKHOUSE. NEW ROAD. WALDBERG.
Clearly he did not know where he was, nor did he even have a code name. The quality of his briefing is indicated by the fact that he knew nothing of English licensing laws—he went into a pub at nine o’clock in the morning and asked for a quart of cider.
(Godliman laughed at this, and Terry said: “Wait—it gets funnier.”)
The landlord told Waldberg to come back at ten. He could spend the hour looking at the village church, he suggested. Amazingly, Waldberg was back at ten sharp, whereupon two policemen on bicycles arrested him.
(“It’s like a script for ‘It’s That Man Again,’” said Godliman.)
Meier was found a few hours later. Eleven more agents were picked up over the next few weeks, most of them within hours of landing on British soil. Almost all of them were destined for the scaffold.
(“Almost all?” said Godliman. Terry said: “Yes. A couple have been handed over to our section B-1(a). I’ll come back to that in a minute.”)
Others landed in Eire. One was Ernst Weber-Drohl, a well-known acrobat who had two illegitimate children in Ireland—he had toured music halls there as “The World’s Strongest Man.” He was arrested by the Garde Siochana, fined three pounds, and turned over to B-1(a).
Another was Hermann Goetz, who parachuted into Ulster instead of Eire by mistake, was robbed by the IRA, swam the Boyne in his fur underwear and eventually swallowed his suicide pill. He had a flashlight marked “Made in Dresden.”
(“If it’s so easy to pick these bunglers up,” Terry said, “why are we taking on brainy types like yourself to catch them? Two reasons. One: we’ve got no way of knowing how many we haven’t picked up. Two: it’s what we do with the ones we don’t hang that matters. This is where B-1(a) comes in. But to explain that I have to go back to 1936.”)
Alfred George Owens was an electrical engineer with a company that had a few government contracts. He visited Germany several times during the ’30s, and voluntarily gave to the Admiralty odd bits of technical information he picked up there. Eventually Naval Intelligence passed him on to MI6 who began to develop him as an agent. The Abwehr recruited him at about the same time, as MI6 discovered when they intercepted a letter from him to a known German cover address. Clearly he was a man totally without loyalty; he just wanted to be a spy. We called him “Snow”; the Germans called him “Johnny.”
In January 1939 Snow got a letter containing (1) instructions for the use of a wireless transmitter and (2) a ticket from the checkroom at Victoria Station.
He was arrested the day after war broke out, and he and his transmitter (which he had picked up, in a suitcase, when he presented the checkroom ticket) were locked up in Wandsworth Prison. He continued to communicate with Hamburg, but now all the messages were written by section B-1(a) of MI5.
The Abwehr put him in touch with two more German agents in England, whom we immediately nabbed. They also gave him a code and detailed wireless procedure, all of which was invaluable.
Snow was followed by Charlie, Rainbow, Summer, Biscuit, and eventually a small army of enemy spies, all in regular contact with Canaris, all apparently trusted by him, and all totally controlled by the British counterintelligence apparatus.
At that point MI5 began dimly to glimpse an awesome and tantalizing prospect: with a bit of luck, they could control and manipulate the entire German espionage network in Britain.
“TURNING AGENTS into double agents instead of hanging them has two crucial advantages,” Terry wound up. “Since the enemy thinks his spies are still active, he doesn’t try to replace them with others who may not get caught. And, since we are supplying the information the spies tell their controllers, we can deceive the enemy and mislead his strategists.”
“It can’t be that easy,” said Godliman.
“Certainly not.” Terry opened a window to let out the fog of cigarette and pipe smoke. “To work, the system has to be very near total. If there is any substantial number of genuine agents here, their information will contradict that of the double agents and the Abwehr will smell a rat.”
“It sounds exciting,” Godliman said. His pipe had gone out.
Terry smiled for the first time that morning. “The people here will tell you it’s hard work—long hours, high tension, frustration—but yes, of course it’s exciting.” He looked at his watch. “Now I want you to meet a very bright young member of my staff. Let me walk you to his office.”
They went out of the room, up some stairs, and along several corridors. “His name is Frederick Bloggs, and he gets annoyed if you make jokes about it,” Terry continued. “We pinched him from Scotland Yard—he was an inspector with Special Branch. If you need arms and legs, use him. You’ll rank above him, of course, but I shouldn’t make too much of that—we don’t, here. I suppose I hardly need to say that to you.”
They entered a small, bare room that looked out on to a blank wall. There was no carpet. A photograph of a pretty girl hung on the wall, and there was a pair of handcuffs on the hat-stand.
Terry said, “Frederick Bloggs, Percival Godliman. I’ll leave you to it.”
The man behind the desk was blond, stocky and short—he must have been only just tall enough to get into the police force, Godliman thought. His tie was an eyesore, but he had a pleasant, open face and an attractive grin. His handshake was firm.
“Tell you what, Percy—I was just going to nip home for lunch,” he said. “Why don’t you come along? The wife makes a lovely sausage and chips.” He had a broad cockney accent.
Sausage and chips was not Godliman’s favorite meal, but he went along. They walked to Trafalgar Square and caught a bus to Hoxton. Bloggs said, “I married a wonderful girl, but she can’t cook for nuts. I have sausage and chips every day.”
East London was still smoking from the previous night’s air raid. They passed groups of firemen and volunteers digging through rubble, playing hoses over dying fires and clearing debris from the streets. They saw an old man carry a precious radio out of a half-ruined house.
Godliman made conversation. “So we’re to catch spies together.”
“We’ll have a go, Perce.”
Bloggs’s home was a three-bedroom semidetached house in a street of exactly similar houses. The tiny front gardens were all being used to grow vegetables. Mrs. Bloggs was the pretty girl in the photograph on the office wall. She looked tired. “She drives an ambulance during the raids, don’t you, love?” Bloggs said. He was proud of her. Her name was Christine.
She said, “Every morning when I come home I wonder if the house will still be here.”
“Notice it’s the house she’s worried about, not me,” Bloggs said.
Godliman picked up a medal in a presentation case from the mantelpiece. “How did you get this?”
Christine answered. “He took a shotgun off a villain who was robbing a post office.”
“You’re quite a pair,” Godliman said.
“You married, Percy?” Bloggs asked.
“I’m a widower.”
“Sorry.”
“My wife died of tuberculosis in 1930. We never had any children.”
“We’re not having any yet,” Bloggs said. “Not while the world’s in this state.”
Christine said: “Oh, Fred, he’s not interested in that!” She went out to the kitchen.
They sat around a square table in the center of the room to eat. Godliman was touched by this couple and the domestic scene, and found himself thinking of his Eleanor. That was unusual; he had been immune to sentiment for some years. Perhaps the nerves were coming alive again, at last. War did funny things.
Christine’s cooking was truly awful. The sausages were burned. Bloggs drowned his meal in tomato ketchup and Godliman cheerfully followed suit.
WHEN THEY GOT BACK to Whitehall Bloggs showed Godliman the file on unidentified enemy agents thought still to be operating in Britain.
There were three sources of information about such people. The first was the immigration records of the Home Office. Passport control had long been an arm of Military Intelligence, and there was a list—going back to the last war—of aliens who had entered the country but had not left or been accounted for in other ways, such as death or naturalization. At the outbreak of war they had all gone before tribunals that classified them in three groups. At first only “A” class aliens were interned; but by July of 1940, after some scaremongering by Fleet Service, the “B” and “C” classes were taken out of circulation. There was a small number of immigrants who could not be located, and it was a fair assumption that some of them were spies.
Their papers were in Bloggs’s file.
The second source were wireless transmissions. Section C of MI8 patrolled the airwaves nightly, recorded everything they did not know for certain to be theirs, and passed it to the Government Code and Cipher School. This outfit, which had recently been moved from London’s Berkeley Street to a country house at Bletchley Park, was not a school at all but a collection of chess champions, musicians, mathematicians and crossword puzzle enthusiasts dedicated to the belief that if a man could invent a code a man could crack it. Signals originating in the British Isles that could not be accounted for by any of the Services were assumed to be messages from spies.
The decoded messages were in Bloggs’s file.
Finally there were the double agents, but their value was largely hoped-for rather than actual. Messages to them from the Abwehr had warned of several incoming agents, and had given away one resident spy—Mrs. Matilda Krafft of Bournemouth, who had sent money to Snow by post and was subsequently incarcerated in Holloway prison. But the doubles had not been able to reveal the identity or locations of the kind of quietly effective professional spies most valuable to a secret intelligence service. No one doubted that there were such people. There were clues—someone, for example, had brought Snow’s transmitter over from Germany and deposited it in the cloakroom at Victoria Station for him to collect. But either the Abwehr or the spies themselves were too cautious to be caught by the doubles.
However the clues were in Bloggs’s file.
Other sources were being developed: the experts were working to improve methods of triangulation (the directional pin-pointing of radio transmitters); and MI6 were trying to rebuild the networks of agents in Europe that had sunk beneath the tidal wave of Hitler’s armies.
What little information there was was in Bloggs’s file.
“It can be infuriating at times,” he told Godliman. “Look at this.”
He took from the file a long radio intercept about British plans for an expeditionary force for Finland. “This was picked up early in the year. The information is impeccable. They were trying to get a fix on him when he broke off in the middle, for no apparent reason—perhaps he was interrupted. He resumed a few minutes later, but he was off the air again before our people had a chance to plug in.”
Godliman said, “What’s this—‘Regards to Willi’?”
“Now, that’s important,” said Bloggs. He was getting enthusiastic. “Here’s a scrap of another message, quite recent. Look—‘Regards to Willi.’ This time there was a reply. He’s addressed as ‘Die Nadel.’”
“The Needle.”
“This one’s a pro. Look at his message: terse, economical, but detailed and completely unambiguous.”
Godliman studied the fragment of the second message. “It appears to be about the effects of the bombing.”
“He’s obviously toured the East End. A pro, a pro.”
“What else do we know about Die Nadel?”
Bloggs’s expression of youthful eagerness collapsed. “That’s it, I’m afraid.”
“His code name is Die Nadel, he signs off ‘Regards to Willi,’ and he has good information—and that’s it?”
“’Fraid so.”
Godliman sat on the edge of the desk and stared out of the window. On the wall of the opposite building, underneath an ornate window sill, he could see the nest of a house-marten. “On that basis, what chance have we of catching him?”
Bloggs shrugged. “On that basis, none at all.”