Fighting to Lose (20 page)

He consulted the D of I (Air) and returned to the phone to say that under
no
circumstances were we to send over information of this kind, and that if any changes in the original arrangements were contemplated, Captain Robertson or some other officer must go and see the D of I about it. I said I understood that the D of I had told Captain Robertson that anything any ordinarily intelligent person could see from the road was all right to send, but F/O Baring did not seem to think this was the case….4

This information was sent anyway, and unmistakeably appears in the Hamburg-Berlin message file, except dated September 18 — nearly three weeks later. The obviously phony “wire trap” information, on the other hand, was forwarded the next day.

In July, when McCarthy went to meet the Germans in Lisbon, he had been asked beforehand by wireless to bring along his national identity card, numbered KRIY 272-2, and his ration book, which happened to be of the pink traveller’s type. He was still in Lisbon when Hamburg wirelessed A-3504 for some “specimen names and numbers” for identity cards, which MI5 immediately supplied, having SNOW reply with twenty examples that included the names Wilson, Williams, Williamson, and Burton, the serial-number prefixes CNSO, PNAJ, and BFAB, and the suffixes 318-1, 141-1, and 141-2.5

Some six weeks later, in the early-morning darkness of September 6, 1940, Gösta Caroli, a Swedish Nazi who had spied for the Germans in England before the war, landed by parachute in a field near Denton, Northamptonshire. At daylight he was discovered asleep by a farm worker who alerted the local constable. On being arrested, Caroli was found to have brought with him a transmitter, maps, £200 in banknotes, and an identity card with the serial number CNSO 141-1 — an obvious match to one of the serial numbers MI5 had provided.6

During his interrogation, Caroli revealed that another parachute spy was to follow, and that they were to rendezvous at a certain pub in Nottingham. Sure enough, two weeks later a man with a Danish passport made out to “Wulf Schmidt” was picked up by police. He was found to possess a British identity card in the name of Williams: PNAJ 272-3. Again the name, letters, and numbers were so close that it could not be coincidence. The connection to Owens was conclusively confirmed by the fact that both spies had on them slips of paper bearing Arthur Owens’s name and his current address.7 Six months earlier, Captain Robertson had berated Owens for not attracting other spies for him to arrest. Now he had two further prizes and the real Arthur Owens had not had to do a thing.

Caroli and Schmidt were certain to be caught. In the weeks immediately before Caroli’s arrival, the Germans sent several messages asking Owens to suggest a suitable landing place for a parachute spy, with the promise of others to come in an operation the Germans referred to as
Unternehmen Lena
. The idea, as MI5 understood it, was that Operation Lena was about the Germans sowing a number of spies with wireless sets around England who would then report on British troop movements when the cross-Channel invasion was launched.8 It was plausible, especially as the RAF had been watching the steady concentration of small craft in the harbours of northern France for much of the summer.

These exchanges with Hamburg seemed to be convincingly backed up by Abwehr wireless traffic intercepted by the Radio Security Service. The Hamburg station was also discovered to be in contact with several outstations (Cherbourg, Brussels, Paris) sending in simple ciphers similar to what the spy ship
Theseus
had been using. Rather than give the traffic to the Government Code & Cipher School, Major Gill and Lieutenant Trevor-Roper again broke the messages themselves. To their great joy, they found they were able to eavesdrop on Abwehr discussions about the
Lena
operation well before the agents were dispatched. MI5, indeed, gave Schmidt the code name TATE even before he arrived in England.9

Administrative confusion at MI5 was at its height when these parachute landings occurred. Otherwise, it would have surely occurred to someone that the enemy secret service branches in northern France and Belgium would be unlikely to communicate with each other and Hamburg by wireless when landline teletype was readily available. Indeed, the Abwehr officers could have more easily and securely discussed their
Lena
plans by simply picking up the telephone and talking in simple code.

The MI5 officers involved would also have been well-advised to consult someone with some basic military knowledge. They would have been told mid-September was too close to winter for Hitler to be contemplating conquering England. As a matter of fact, Hitler put the invasion off indefinitely on September 14; Schmidt didn’t land until September 19.10

Colonel “Tin Eye” Stephens — so-named for the monocle he always wore — led the interrogations of Caroli and Schmidt. He was a forty-year-old former India Army officer with no police or investigative experience, who just two months earlier had been named to head up an MI5 interrogation centre that had been set up in a nineteenth-century mansion and former First World War hospital, Latchmere House, located in south London. They were his first prisoners of any consequence, and he was later to call them “the most spectacular wartime successes of the British counter-espionage service.” Both men agreed to change sides. Caroli becoming the double agent SUMMER and Schmidt the double agent TATE.

All shadow of doubt about Owens still lingering in MI5 minds over the North Sea fiasco fell away, and the bomb-damage and ship-sighting reports of A-3504 (Owens/ SNOW) covering Britain’s major ports multiplied, supplemented by observations turned in by A-3527 (Eschborn/ CHARLIE) and A-3554 (McCarthy/BISCUIT). Robertson’s modest wireless double-agent operation had gone from one transmitter sending for one double agent to three sending for five.11 This was certain to impress the government heavyweights then eyeing MI5 with sharpened knives.

It all made it very easy for Major Ritter, and he must have been very happy. The identity card scam had buttressed British confidence in Owens and given Ritter two more wireless agents in England whom he knew would be under British control. His adversaries had apparently also accepted in principle the idea that Ast Hamburg, and other Abwehr centres, would chat about their spies by wireless rather than landline, and in ciphers that any novice could break. He must have been pleasantly surprised when the transmitters of Caroli and Schmidt, A-3719 and A-3725, both came on air. The prospect of planting more triple agents on the gullible British was very bright.

By the middle of October, Caroli and Schmidt were in contact with Hamburg. Both men were competent telegraph-key operators and so sent their own messages — Caroli from various places north of London, as though he was a spy on the move; Schmidt always from Barnet, a town northeast of London where the Radio Security Service and MI5’s Wireless Branch, presumably with Robertson, had moved to the month before. On November 1, they transmitted their first simultaneous weather observations taken at 5:00 p.m., Caroli’s, from near Cambridge, included barometric pressure. On being received by Hamburg, they were forwarded directly to the Luftwaffe’s weather service.12

MI5 contributed enormously to the German pilots’ margin of safety that autumn of 1940 and over the winter. The daily weather reports it sent through SNOW, SUMMER, and TATE always included current conditions, estimates of visibility, cloud cover, and cloud height, and, starting in November, barometric pressure, the latter being a great help to the Luftwaffe’s weather service in compiling forecasts.13 Even a half-day warning as to where it was to be rainy or clear was hugely useful to Luftwaffe planners scheduling what cities to attack, and comforting to nervous U-boat commanders contemplating the dangerous dash across the Bay of Biscay.

Certainly, the Luftwaffe was the best served. In listing the factories and infrastructure damaged and destroyed in the notorious Coventry raid of November 14, A-3504-Owens concluded that monthly production of Spitfires and Hurricanes had been almost cut in half. This could only have been encouragement for Göring’s bomber crews, who understood they were supposed to be targeting Britain’s war industries rather than randomly bombing.14

The British chiefs of staff did not know of these goings-on. They had been asked in September whether they wanted to be closely informed of deception schemes and they said no. It was then left to the director of Air Intelligence, Commodore Boyle, to advise on the offerings of BISCUIT, CHARLIE, SNOW, SUMMER, and TATE.15 It appears from available MI5 files that neither the current chief of the air staff, Lord Newell, nor his successor, Lord Portal, knew that the Luftwaffe was being given up-to-date weather information. As the Blitz intensified that autumn and winter, the three wireless double agents continued to transmit their observations once or sometimes twice a day.

Captain Robertson and his Wireless Branch boss, Frost, were not supplying this precious intelligence completely on their own. With Kell and his deputy, Holt-Wilson, gone, and with Brigadier Jasper Harker desperately trying to contend with the oars Lord Swinton kept inserting into things, the soft-spoken, former Scotland Yard man, Guy Liddell, was in effect running the show. As solo head of B Division — Mr. Crocker having quit in September — everything pertaining to MI5’s double agents theoretically came under his scrutiny, including their weather reports. These he described in his diary as accurate “though limited.”16 Given the detail that was actually in them, especially barometric pressure, it is hard to see what more the Germans could have wanted.

Liddell is of particular interest at this time for another reason.

MI5, it will be recalled, had spent the lion’s share of its effort during the 1920s and ’30s in counter-subversion work against suspected communists and left-wingers, a legacy of the Bolshevik scare that had gripped Britain’s Establishment during the First World War. This had involved intercepting mail and telephone calls, running informers, tailing suspects, and, most important of all, keeping track of people “of interest.” This was the task of the Central Registry, the MI5/MI6 secret archive consisting of a card index of names running into the hundreds of thousands backed up by PFs — personal files on individuals — in the tens of thousands. The Central Registry was the main memory of both secret services, but was administered by MI5 and housed in 1940 along with the rest of the Security Service in the former nineteenth-century prison of Wormwood Scrubs.17

At the beginning of the Blitz, during the night of September 29, the Registry was swept by flames, apparently hit by a German oil bomb, an incendiary that splashed inflammable fluid when it hit. How it penetrated the roof of Wormwood Scrubs is unknown. No MI5 files have been released that deal with the incident.18

Liddell mentions the air attack in his diary:

I dined with Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess at the Reform Club. Just as I was going away at 11:30 p.m. a Molotov breadbasket descended. Three incendiary bombs fell just inside Pall Mall and all sorts of people were rushing about in dressing gowns with bags of sand. When I got into the Mall the whole of St. James Park was lit up as by Roman candles.19

The next day’s diary entry reads: “When I arrived at the office this morning I found that part of the Registry had been burnt by incendiary bombs and that the card index had been destroyed. Mercifully, we had had it photographed. Some thousand files had also been destroyed.”20

Anthony Blunt, with whom Liddell dined that evening, was then a thirty-three-year-old Cambridge graduate and art historian who, after the war, was painfully discovered to have been working as a penetration agent for the Soviets. He and Burgess were members of the notorious “Cambridge Five,” Englishmen of privilege who were exposed in the 1950s and sixties as having fed the West’s most precious secrets to Stalin. The others in the group were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and a fifth whose identity is still disputed. Together with Blunt and Burgess, they penetrated MI6, MI5, the Foreign Office, and the Government Code & Cipher School. Their take during the Cold War included secrets pertaining to the atomic bomb and U.S.-U.K. counter-intelligence moves against the Soviets. It was the twentieth century’s most spectacular espionage achievement.

Blunt, Burgess, and Maclean had been obvious communists during their student days at Cambridge, Burgess and Maclean noisily so. Philby had been less obvious, but was open about having communist sympathies when serving as a volunteer in the workers’ rebellion in Vienna in the mid-1930s. He later covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the
Times.
The names of all four would have been in the Registry’s card index, and there would have been PFs — personal files — on all of them.21 The fire destroyed the card index that would have led to these dossiers.22

For those inclined to conspiracy theories, there are other intriguing facts surrounding this incident:

• In September 1940, most in government saw Stalin as an ally of Hitler and believed that the Soviets were likely soon to come into the war on the side of the Nazis.23
  
• Liddell was then MI5’s (and therefore Britain’s) counter-espionage chief. How, then, did he come to be chatting amiably over supper at his club with two fairly notorious pre-war Cambridge communists, whose dossiers it would have been his duty to read?
  
• A PF (personal file) in the Registry could not safely be made to disappear so long as there was a name-card in the index that pointed to it.
  
• Most of the cards were destroyed.
  
• The Registry supposedly occupied the glass-roofed former prison laundry which could not be locked.24
  
• Victor Rothschild, a Cambridge scientist personally recruited by Liddell four months earlier, had been assigned the task of having the card-index microfilmed just before the fire, so in a way it was saved.
  
• The copying, however, was poorly done. Reconstruction of the card index was not completed until June 1941 (when Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin became an ally).25
  
• Once the fire had occurred, it would have been impossible to determine whether specific files and their index cards had been removed before the microfilming.