Codebreakers Victory (18 page)

 

 

The XX Committee: Master Tricksters

 

Behind all this artful hocus-pocus is an equally inventive story. When the war began, the German secret service was bereft of spies in Britain. This was the result of deliberate policy. Ever hopeful of persuading those Aryan-blooded Brits to join, or at least acquiesce in, the German battle against the Bolsheviks, Hitler had forbidden placing any agents in Britain. He wanted to avoid having the unmasking of spies roil the relationship. Only when it became evident that Britain would remain an implacable foe did Hitler allow the creation of a spy network.

The Germans were clumsy in this task. While their agents were generally fluent in English, they were poorly trained in the vagaries of English social norms and quickly gave themselves away. One tried to use his forged ration book to pay for a meal at a restaurant. Another, when billed two-and-six, thought that meant two pounds and six shillings, not two shillings and sixpence. The agents' fake identity documents contained easy-to-spot errors that had been placed there on the sneaky advice of Snow. Germans landing with radios began immediately to send messages from one location as though not knowing that direction finding allowed the British to triangulate on them and track them down. And the Germans trusted agents such as Snow so unreservedly that they gave him the names of other spies, who were summarily captured.

In its first major attempt to place spies in Britain, from September to November 1940, the Abwehr landed twenty-one agents. All but one were captured or gave themselves up. The exception committed suicide.

When the British realized what a prime asset they had in their hands, questions arose as to how to make the most of it. How could they manage the finicky game of supplying information that would satisfy the Abwehr without doing real harm to Britain? In January 1941, representatives of the various services and the Foreign Office came together to establish the Double Cross Committee, also called the Twenty Committee because the Roman letters for twenty depict a double cross. Holding weekly meetings until May 1945, the Double Cross Committee took over responsibility for control of the double agents.

Chosen to head the committee was J. C. Masterman. Before taking on this wartime duty he had made his living as a writer of popular mystery novels. Now he turned his skills to the task of supervising the scripts to be transmitted to the Germans.

The committee started cautiously. Acceptance of the incredible fact that there were no undetected spies in Britain, and therefore no one to alert the Abwehr that its network was comprised of all double agents, was slow to sink in. Also, before becoming too bold with misinformation, the credibility of the double agents had to be established in order to make their spy-masters confident they were being well served.

A case officer was assigned to each double agent. Usually this was an older man who could serve as a father figure to the uprooted, scared and often unstable youth under his control. The Twenty Committee saw to it that the agent's course was as authentic as possible. If an agent was requested by his spymaster to report on a specific defense factory, Masterman wrote later, "We arranged, if it was possible, that he should visit the place himself before he replied." The agent "must experience all that he had professed to have done." The committee also saw to it that each agent was provided with an identity card, ration books, clothing coupons, a place to live, a housekeeper and cook, day and night guards, possibly a car and driver, and a radio operator to monitor and transmit his messages.

Care was taken to back up agents' claims. In addition to the war plant explosion to justify Zigzag's reports, a mock generating station was blown up, and at a time when the Nazis were convinced that the U-boats were starving the British, a simulated food storage area was destroyed. Newspaper accounts of the shocking incidents of sabotage made good reading for the Abwehr and earned fresh plaudits for their hard-working agents.

Treading the narrow catwalk of responding to the German spymasters' queries and orders without surrendering information of real value, the committee members made it an ironclad practice never to release new material until it had been cleared by the appropriate authority. At times cautious reviewers crossed out whole sections of proposed scenarios. When the Americans came aboard, the same courtesy was extended to them. General Eisenhower and Admiral Stark were asked to name an army and a navy officer to approve what Double Cross would report about the American forces.

Always in the minds of Masterman and his team was the idea that, as he explained, "at some time in the distant future a great day would come when our agents would be used for a grand and final deception of the enemy." Awaiting that day, they satisfied themselves with less bold deceits.

When invasion of Britain was threatened, the agents accentuated the island's readiness to fend off attackers. The shore defenses were made to seem perceptibly stronger than they were. Warnings went to the Abwehr that antiaircraft resources were being effectively organized to destroy Luftwaffe planes. The numbers of Spitfires available to the RAF were boosted, and the production of new aircraft was exaggerated. German generals were not to be allowed to think the British people would give in tamely; the mood was reported to be defiant, the morale high.

During the Blitz, the Air Ministry gave the committee a special charge: persuade the Luftwaffe to ease off on bombing the cities and concentrate more on the RAF airfields. In order to win the war of attrition, the ministry wanted the German planes to fly where the antiaircraft defenses were strongest—RAF's airfields—and lessen their attacks against the less well protected urban centers. The committee responded by preparing papers purporting to report on a hand-wringing meeting of the Air Raid Review Committee. The papers expressed alarm about poor defenses at the airfields and the inadequacy of the training of their antiaircraft gunners. These were weaknesses that must be corrected: altogether too many planes were being destroyed on the ground. Naturally these distressing papers fell into the hands of Germany's agents.

Did the deception work? An Ultra decrypt told of the German air force's belief that "the British ground organization concentrated in the south of England is the Achilles' heel of the RAF. A planned attack on the ground organization will hit the British air force at its most tender spot."

Similarly, the Twenty Committee was given a role to play in the deception carried out in November 1942 to mislead the Germans about the Allied landings in northwest Africa. The Nazis were aware that something big was coming; they didn't know where. To keep them off guard, the double agents played to Hitler's fears of an attack through Norway and also raised the specter of a landing in northern France. As far as a landing in Africa was concerned, Ultra decrypts showed that the Germans felt sure the Allies lacked the shipping to manage a landing inside the Mediterranean; they believed any landing the Allies might try would be made down the West African coast at Dakar. The deception worked: there was little opposition when the Allies went ashore at Oran and Algiers, inside the Mediterranean, as well as at Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast.

Double Cross was a fragile venture. Everyone feared that each day the cover would be blown and the Germans would wake up to the fact that they were being gulled. Several times that moment came perilously close. Probably the closest call came with the agent code-named Summer. He was another of those German lads who had parachuted into Britain, been captured and chosen to cooperate. But his betrayal weighed on him. One day he half strangled his guard and raced off on the guard's motorbike, heading for the coast. Along the way he came across a canoe he could steal. He lashed it to the bike, apparently thinking he could use it to cross the Channel or the North Sea. Unfortunately for Summer, the bike broke down, and he was recaptured and, to make sure he would make no further attempt, executed. The reliable Snow reported to Summer's spymaster that his agent had come under suspicion by the police and had gone into hiding. So Double Cross survived another day, and in fact kept on fooling the Germans until the war's end.

The question remains: why did the Germans fail to realize that their agents were submitting more misinformation than material of true benefit? Masterman's answer was that much of this vulnerability derived from the Abwehr's flawed system. Each spymaster's prestige, job security and income depended on his having discovered an agent and launched him on his career. If an agent's reliability was questioned, his chief defender invariably turned out to be his own case officer, who would go to any lengths to protect him against doubt and criticism. After all, any case officer who admitted misgivings about his agent could face the prospect of a Gestapo prison or reassignment to the Russian front.

Soon after the war ended, Masterman prepared a report on the Twenty Committee, but for twenty-five years he could not get approval to have it published. His slim volume,
The Double-Cross System,
appeared in 1972.

That was too soon for him to reveal the role of the codebreakers in helping Double Cross succeed. He referred instead to "secret sources" that "permitted us to observe that the reports of our agents were transmitted to Berlin; that they were believed." Hinsley's later history spelled out BP's participation and detailed how Bletchley's codebreakers mastered each advance in the sophistication of the Abwehr's codes, including its conversion to Enigma.

Conquest of the Abwehr Enigma, as Sebag-Montefiore has related in
Enigma,
was another triumph for Dilly Knox and his "girls," the pretty young women he liked to have around him—all quite platonically, it would seem. Using the manual techniques Knox called "rodding," Mavis Lever and Margaret Rock broke the Abwehr cipher on December 8, 1941.

The rewards of the codebreaking went well beyond verifying that the double agents' skewed information was being accepted as truth. The spy-masters' questions supplied rich clues as to the direction of the Germans' thoughts and intentions. They also pointed up gaps in the enemy's knowledge that could be exploited. In tandem, the Twenty Committee and Bletchley Park made "turned" spies and Nazi-hating volunteer agents into strong contributors to Allied victory. In Hinsley's words, they turned what the Germans thought to be a major asset into "a substantial liability."

 

 

Tricycle's Ignored Pearl Harbor Warning

 

Another series of incidents involving one of Britain's double agents, the Yugoslav volunteer Dusko Popov, deserves mention here. The first was that previously mentioned raid on Italian warships at Taranto. On a November night in 1940, Britain's fast new aircraft carrier
Illustrious,
guarded by a screen of four cruisers and four destroyers, slipped stealthily through the Mediterranean southeast of the boot of Italy. Just after eight-thirty, her crew began launching the carrier's twenty-one venerable open-cockpit Fairy Swordfish torpedo bombers. Their target lay 170 miles away: the good portion of Italy's war fleet that lay at anchor in Taranto's harbor.

The sneak attack completely surprised the Italians. Swooping in at mast height, the Swordfish sent their missiles crashing into ship after ship. At the cost of just two planes, the British sank or badly damaged three battleships, two cruisers and two destroyers, putting nearly half the Italian navy out of action for a long period. Most important, the raid frightened the Italians into moving their capital ships out of Taranto and into the safer harbor at Naples. The significance was that they were now too far away to be effective against British convoys in the Mediterranean.

In May 1941, the Italians were again surprised—this time by a visit of Japanese naval officers wishing to review their Tripartite partner's naval facilities. Rear Admiral Kobe Abe and his aides wanted to know every possible detail of the British Taranto raid and form in their minds a complete picture of how it was carried out.

Shortly afterward, Popov made one of his regular trips to Lisbon, ostensibly for business but actually to check in with his German spymasters. There he also met with Johnny Jebsen, who, although highly placed in the Abwehr secret service, was revealing himself to be as anti-Nazi as Popov. In fact, Jebsen did become a double agent, code-named Artist, working for the Twenty Committee.

In Lisbon, Jebsen reported on his own puzzling recent mission. He had been a German representative in the group escorting the Japanese at Taranto. It was clear to him, as he informed Popov, that Japan's military leaders were gathering information to guide their own surprise attack by carrier aircraft. But against whom? And where?

The answers, Popov was convinced, came when the top German intelligence officer in Lisbon met with him, instructed him to go to the U.S., asked that he set about establishing a new German spy ring in the country and gave him a questionnaire to which the Germans wanted answers. It was also urgent that Popov travel to Hawaii as soon as he could manage. When he read the questionnaire he could understand why. Of the hundred or so points of interest included, fully a third pertained to Hawaii, with a whole series of questions relating specifically to Pearl Harbor.

Popov was in no doubt, nor were his British colleagues when he returned to London, regarding the significance of these two events. The Japanese were planning a Taranto-style attack on the Pearl Harbor anchorage of U.S. Navy ships. The Germans were doing what they could to supply their Asian partners with useful information.

What to do with this vital intelligence? The British at the time were gingerly seeking to improve relations with the one U.S. agency then assigned to conduct counterespionage activities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Masterman and his associates judged that the FBI's credit-seeking director, J. Edgar Hoover, would jump at the chance to be the one to alert the U.S. military to Japan's planned raid. They also believed that Hoover would welcome the opportunity to work with Popov in developing an American equivalent of the Twenty Committee. It seemed right to Popov's British controllers that he himself should meet with Hoover and his FBI staff members, since, as Popov wrote, "the Americans might want to question me at length to extract the last bit of juice."