Fighting to Lose (23 page)

Air Commodore Boyle was very insistent that it was essential that the W-Board should not get tied up with formal directives, et cetera; it was obvious to him that it would be necessary to pass items of true information to the enemy, either as buildup of the agents or to maintain their plausibility, and if such matters had to be referred to others, such as the chiefs of staff (who could not expect to familiarize themselves with this art), either permission would be refused or there would be such delay as to have dire results; also, the Twenty Committee and the W-Board would have to do some “odd things” of the kind that it is the job of the directors of intelligence to authorize on their own responsibility.

Masterman, in
The
Double-Cross System
, was even more succinct:

D of I (Air) took the line that knowledge of the double-cross system should be confined to MI5, MI6, and the three Directors of Intelligence, and that risks should be taken to maintain what he felt to be potentially a weapon of great value and that the system should not be allowed to become a plaything of higher authorities who would not use it adequately, and who would also, perhaps, boggle at the responsibilities involved.23

It would seem Masterman did not have much faith in Britain’s military leaders.

The rules for the XX Committee were about the same: it would meet, discuss, and decide, but written records were to be retained only by MI5 and MI6. The service members of the committee were not to share anything with their superior officers, and any papers they did receive were to be kept to themselves. The committee could give suggestions on what to send the Germans, but the final decision and content of messages would be left to the experts in MI5/MI6, which meant mainly those of MI5. The double-agent case officers would oversee the composing and sending of messages.24

The aims of the double-cross program would be as before:

• to limit the expansion of enemy espionage activity by persuading the enemy that it had successful agents in place;
  
• to derive the enemy’s intentions from his questionnaires;
  
• to use the ciphers given his agents to break into the enemy’s general wireless traffic.25
  

As a sop to the DMI, it was proposed that the new committee would also try to stage deceptions whereby German raiders would be lured onto sites where a “hot reception” would await them.

Boyle’s proposal was backed up by Liddell, and it prevailed. The Wireless Board came into being without the knowledge of the chiefs of staff and outside any chain of command. It had no authority, no budget, and no presence on paper. It initially comprised the three directors of intelligence, plus Liddell for MI5 and Menzies for MI6. It was to meet only when a member requested a meeting, and was to receive reports from the XX Committee only when the board felt in need of the committee’s advice. It was not supposed to give orders, only guidance. It sought to achieve “super-secrecy” by officially not existing.

Liddell and Commodore Boyle were the principal architects of this Mad Hatter’s committee of senior intelligence officers who answered to no one, but they had crucial support. MI6 chief Stewart Menzies was included in the discussions at every stage. He was then in the process of overhauling his counter-espionage section — Section V — so that it could directly handle MI5’s double agents on their trips abroad. Menzies reported directly to Churchill.

The Wireless Board held its first meeting on January 8, 1941,and it was decided that civilian representation was warranted, with the result being that Sir Findlater Stewart of the Home Defence Executive was secretly approached to join. He was willing to play along, he told the others at the next meeting in February, but he did not see how he could make recommendations or make decisions affecting various government agencies without sometimes having to inform the responsible minister. It was proposed that he share his misgivings with Sir John Anderson, the wartime head of Britain’s public service.

Sir John conferred with Churchill. Word came back as follows:

They both appreciated all the considerations and told Sir Findlater that neither of them could, constitutionally, authorize him to deal with matters which appertained to other Ministries, but obviously there was a job to do and he should get on with it. If there was ever a row about this work Sir Findlater could not claim to have been “authorized” to do what he was about to do, but both Sir John Anderson and the Prime Minister “unofficially approved.…”26

In other words: the message was, “What you propose to do is breaking the law, but do it anyway.”

Sir Findlater Stewart accepted these conditions. The War Office, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office joined the chiefs of staff in the dark.

Caroli, a.k.a. SUMMER, a.k.a. A-3719, did not last long as a double agent. He was used by MI5 as a kind of roving spy, seeing what he could see in the Midlands and making on-the-spot weather observations. Early November found him reporting the weather alternately from Birmingham and from east of Coventry, always in the evenings and always with barometric pressure. His observations complemented those from SNOW (Owens) in London, whose readings were taken in the mornings and, after November 9, also included barometric pressure.

The report Caroli would have made for November 14, the day of the massive Coventry raid, is missing A-3719’s Nest Bremen file, which was among the records the British seized from in 1945. The one from Owens on that date is still in his file, but the bottom three-quarters of it has been snipped off, leaving only the date and the Luftwaffe Weather Service address.27

According to other messages in his file, Caroli was in London on November 16 and 17, but again “near Birmingham” the evening of the 19th, just before the big raid on that city started. Owens reported that morning that the weather was clear, visibility two miles, cloud cover 90 percent at six thousand feet. Caroli sent at 7:30 p.m. that it was now overcast, visibility was poor, but it was likely to clear.

The raid on Birmingham lasted the night, the bombers coming in waves — about four hundred of them. The effect was devastating. Buildings were destroyed, streets cratered, fires burned everywhere. Worst was the direct hit on the British Small Arms Factory. The night shift had taken to the cellars rather than go to the air raid shelter, and the building came down upon them. Fifty-two out of fifty-three of the buried died before they could be reached. Others were killed, but in ones and twos, here and there. The targets were the factories, but the bombs and incendiaries hit homes as well. Birmingham that night was a second Coventry.

Caroli watched, probably in a field somewhere outside the city where he and his guard had stretched out his aerial. It would have been like looking at a fireworks show from afar: patches of light playing on the cloud bottoms, a mumble of thunder, flashes like lightning, and an orange swath growing on the horizon. It rained the next day, but when it stopped the city was attacked again.

It was MI5’s practice at this time to have its double agents actually view what was going to be in their messages, and as Caroli was slated to send in a bomb-damage report, he would have been taken into the city. He would have seen the streets blocked with rubble, the dead being collected, and he certainly would have passed the flattened BSA building where weary rescuers were still digging in the heap of broken concrete and bricks. Caroli subsequently transmitted a very long report that covered the damage, but not the tears. He never sent another weather report.

Caroli was a parson’s son, likely attracted to the Nazis by Hitler’s promises of a fairer world. He was big and he was resolute. One day in early January, out in the countryside somewhere, he clubbed his guard unconscious, rifled his pockets for £5, tied him up, and took off on a stolen motorcycle towing a “canoe” that he had spotted in a nearby barn. He was headed for the coast. There was a hue and cry and he was caught. He was returned to detention at Latchmere House. His brief career as the double agent SUMMER was definitely over.28

Caroli turned out to be lucky. Churchill had decreed that captured spies that were not otherwise useful should be executed. That would have been Caroli’s death warrant, except that his daring and passion for escape — he tried to cut his way through the barbed wire that enclosed Latchmere House — had won him sympathizers among his captors. A legal loophole was found that circumvented the prime minister’s order. Caroli survived the war.29

A man named Josef Jakobs was not so fortunate. A little more than a week after Caroli had signed off for the final time, Jakobs came down by parachute near Ramsey, Huntingdonshire. He broke his ankle while landing, and the forty-one-year-old German had no choice but to fire his pistol in the air to summon help. During interrogation, he admitted his assignment had been to send weather observations. He also claimed that he had been forced into espionage by the Gestapo after being arrested for helping Jews. In his pocket, he had the address of a Jewish woman he intended to make contact with.

As he was “manifestly unemployable,” and because “there was no good reason for him to live,” Colonel Stephens, the bitter chief inquisitor at Latchmere House, had the satisfaction of seeing him shot by firing squad at the Tower of London. He was a brave man, Stephens conceded. “His last words directed the ‘Tommies’ to shoot straight.”30

10

January–July 1941

The five men central to MI5’s double-cross program glumly faced one another across the table. It was April 10, 1941. By this time, they normally referred to the double agents only by their code names. SNOW, a.k.a. Owens, had been blown, and with him all but one of the other double agents in wireless contact with Germany. “It was agreed that the Doctor [RANTZAU] knew about our control of agents and probably knew as much about it as SNOW and CELERY,” one of them wrote that day. “The fact that he wishes to keep the party alive is a strong argument for closing it down.”1

It was a terrible blow. The counter-intelligence program that had held such promise, that had reflected so much credit on MI5, appeared wounded beyond recovery. A year before it had been a struggle for MI5 to win recognition for the idea of “turning” captured spies and playing them back to the enemy. Since then, wireless exchanges between Owens and his German contacts had led to the capture of nearly a dozen spies landed by boat and parachute, including two more with transmitters. Ten in all were now sending messages back to Germany under MI5 control. Just recently, two Norwegians who landed by rubber boat in Scotland had been added to the double-agent roster, plus a smooth-talking Yugoslav who at that very moment was in Lisbon duping the German spy chief for Portugal.

Lucky it was, too, that the ciphers provided these spies were simple and apparently widely used. An eloquent appeal from Major Gill of the Radio Security Service had triggered a better effort by the Government Code & Cipher School, and the previous December its cryptographers had broken what appeared to be the main Abwehr hand cipher — i.e., a cipher that can be composed and solved by paper and pencil methods.2 Early results had indicated it was going to be possible to read what the Germans themselves were saying of the double agents planted on them.

To top it all off, the service directors of intelligence had been sufficiently impressed to agree to the setting up of a committee dominated by MI5 that would independently oversee the information to be fed the Germans. This was the so-called XX Committee. It held its first meeting in a room at Wormwood Scrubs on January 2, 1941. Four months later, it was poised to run down any undiscovered spies through a scheme called Plan
Midas
, whereby the Germans were to be persuaded to make their agent, A-3504 (a.k.a. Owens, a.k.a. SNOW), paymaster to all Abwehr spies in Britain.

All this lovely progress was about to go up in smoke, however. It also opened up the five MI5 officers sitting at the table that day to accusations of amateurism, although it was true that they were amateurs. Guy Liddell, MI5’s B Division chief, was a seasoned investigator, but his pre-war experience had all had to do with anti-subversion work rather than counter-espionage against a sophisticated foreign power. His thirty-five-year-old deputy, Dick White, had been a schoolmaster when recruited in 1936, and the sum of his field experience consisted of two years in Germany cultivating people of his own age and social class. Three years his junior, “TAR” Robertson, the officer directly managing the wireless double agents, had spent the 1930s tracking domestic Bolsheviks, not spies.