The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (37 page)

The Twenty Club’s job was to decide what information could be fed back to the
Abwehr
without damaging the British cause. Initially, with the threat of a German invasion dominating the atmosphere in London, it was decided that the ‘intelligence’ provided by the double agents should be used to give an impression of how strong Britain’s defences were. But by the beginning of 1941, it was clear that more could be done with the double agents. They could be used to deceive the Germans, to provide them with misleading information that would give Allied forces an advantage in the field.

The MI5 and MI6 officers handling the double agents needed to know what information they could give to their agents to build up their reputations with the Germans. Much of it was ‘chicken-feed’, unimportant information that would give the
Abwehr
a feel that its agents were doing something and had access to real intelligence, without telling them anything really harmful to the war effort. But mixed among this were key pieces of specious or misleading information, designed to build up a false picture of what the British were doing.

The committee’s task was to co-ordinate this work. They supervised the system but they did not run the individual agents. ‘They approved the overall plan,’ Astor said. ‘I was in touch with the Germans probably two or three times a day by radio and so I had to move fairly quickly. So the approving authorities were not the actual Twenty Committee
because it only sat once a week. I would get approval from people who were on the committee and every week I and others who were actually active would prepare a short report for the committee saying what we were doing and what we had done.’

But while the system appeared to be working, the Twenty Committee and the agent handlers had a problem. They could not be sure the Germans were fooled. The
Abwehr’s
operations abroad seemed to be unbelievably incompetent. The agents were ‘too amateurish’ to be genuine. Capturing them and turning them around was so easy that the British suspected that it might be part of an elaborate
Abwehr
deception. Even if this were not the case, the lax system employed by the Germans, who ignored basic security procedures by putting the agents in touch with each other, warned the Twenty Committee when any new agents were sent to Britain. But it also meant that if the
Abwehr
realized that one of its agents was operating under British control, it would have to assume that they were all blown. ‘The position at the beginning was largely experimental as no one knew very much about the working of double agents or about the working and general incompetence of the
Abwehr
,’ wrote Ewen Montagu, the naval intelligence representative on the committee. ‘Later on after we had had experience of the German Intelligence Service, no incompetence would have surprised us.’

While the response of the
Abwehr
controllers to the double agents’ reports helped the Twenty Committee to work out where the gaps in the Germans’ knowledge lay, it did not tell them whether or not the misleading intelligence picture they were attempting to build up was believed in Berlin. The only way of finding this out was by deciphering the messages passed between the
Abwehr
outstations in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and their headquarters. But these links all used the
Abwehr’s
Enigma machine, which was completely different to those used by the other German services.

So the Twenty Club’s confidence in their double agents was considerably enhanced in December 1941 when Dilly Knox, who was terminally ill with cancer and working from home, broke the
Abwehr
Enigma. This followed six months of research during which he was assisted by a young Mavis Lever (now Batey) and Margaret Rock. It was to be the last of Knox’s remarkable achievements. Just over a year later, in February 1943, and after a long struggle against cancer, he died.

The first of the messages, known as ISK for Illicit (or Intelligence) Services Knox, was issued on Christmas Day 1941. They were
invaluable to the Twenty Committee, revealing that the Germans believed the false intelligence the Twenty Committee was feeding them and showing whether or not individual double agents were trusted or under suspicion, in which case steps could be taken to remedy the situation. Two months later, Mavis Lever solved a separate
Abwehr
Enigma machine, known as GGG, which was used near the Spanish border. By the spring of 1942, the information collected from the Bletchley Park decrypts had built up such a good picture of
Abwehr
operations in Britain that Robertson was able to state categorically that MI5 now controlled all the German agents operating in Britain. The Twenty Committee was able to watch the Germans making arrangements to send agents to Britain and discussing the value of their reports, Robertson wrote. ‘In two or three cases we have been able to observe the action (which has been rapid and extensive) taken by the Germans upon the basis of these agents’ reports.’

Nevertheless, the breaking of the Enigma cipher had brought a new problem for the committee. The release of any material from Bletchley Park was controlled extremely strictly by MI6 in order to safeguard the Ultra secret. The fact that the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma ciphers had been broken had to be protected at all costs. The MI6 representative on the committee was Felix Cowgill, the head of Section V, the MI6 counter-espionage division. A former Indian Police officer, Cowgill was a shy, slightly built man in his mid-thirties. ‘His face gives the impression of intensity coupled with a great weariness,’ said Kim Philby, the MI6 officer and KGB spy, in one of his reports to Moscow. ‘Although normally quiet in manner, due to shyness, he is combative in his work, always prepared to challenge an office ruling.’

Cowgill defended the Ultra decrypts vigorously, to the extent of refusing to allow the Home Forces and Home Defence Executive representatives on the Twenty Committee to see them at all, while anything that referred to MI6 agents was held back even from MI5. ‘Cowgill was so imbued with the idea of security that when he was put in charge for C of this material, he was quite willing to try entirely to prevent its use as intelligence lest it be compromised,’ Montagu said. ‘These views inevitably caused friction.’

While there was no doubt that some within MI5 were paying scant regard to the necessary restrictions on the Bletchley Park decrypts, Cowgill’s attitude made the Twenty Committee’s operations almost impossible. Some members were not privy to vital information about
the agents on which the others were basing their decisions. The result was potentially far more detrimental to security than the widespread dissemination that Cowgill was trying to prevent. His controls were soon being ignored on a wholesale basis. ‘A good deal of bootlegging of information had to take place,’ said Montagu. ‘Many undesirable “off the record” and “under the table” practices were essential unless work was to stop entirely.’

The situation came to a head over the case of a man who was to become the most valuable of all the Double Cross agents – Juan Pujol Garcia, better known by his codename: Garbo. The Bletchley decrypts had revealed an
Abwehr
agent who claimed to be running a network of agents in Britain. His reports were ridiculously inaccurate. He was clearly a fraud, reporting ‘drunken orgies and slack morals in amusement centres’ in Liverpool, and Glasgow dockers who were ‘prepared to do anything for a litre of wine’. It ought to have been obvious to the Germans that, not only had he never met a Glasgow docker in his life, he had never been to Britain. Yet they believed him wholeheartedly. MI6 became concerned that his false reports might damage the Twenty Club’s own plans. Then in early February 1940, the MI6 head of station in Lisbon reported that he had been approached by a Spaniard, claiming to be a top
Abwehr
secret agent. He said he had been disaffected by the Spanish Civil War and was keen to help Britain to fight the Germans. Having been turned down by the MI6 station in Madrid, he had gone to the
Abwehr
equivalent, persuading the officers there that he was a Spanish intelligence officer who had been posted to Britain and offering to act as a German spy.

In fact, Pujol went to Lisbon, where, armed with a Blue Guide to Britain, a Portuguese book on the Royal Navy and an Anglo-French vocabulary of military terms, he produced a series of highly imaginative reports built on his alleged network of agents. Pujol was vehemently anti-Nazi and his reports were apparently designed to disrupt the German intelligence service – he was in effect a freelance double-cross operation in miniature. Cowgill kept him secret from MI5, on the basis that although sending reports ostensibly from British territory and therefore notionally under MI5 jurisdiction, he was actually abroad and the responsibility of MI6.

The fact that an important German agent was sending uncontrolled reports about Britain, however inaccurate, could have caused immense damage if it had not been taken into account in the overall deception
plan. So when, at the end of February, senior officers in MI5 discovered that his existence had been hidden from them, they were furious. A few weeks later, they discovered that Cowgill had also been holding back ISOS messages thought to refer to MI6 agents, placing them in a separate series known as ISBA, which was not being circulated to either MI5 or the service intelligence departments.

This was the final straw and Sir David Petrie, the head of MI5, used the row to lobby for MI5 to take over control of Section V. He added all the arguments over the distribution of deciphered intercepts, MI5 criticism of the apparent lack of basic knowledge about Germany among a number of Section V officers, and the fact that it was based in St Albans, too far away from London to make liaison with MI5 as easy as it should have been. Stewart Menzies proposed a compromise. He would set up a new department within Section V called VX to deal exclusively with the Double Cross system. It would be based in London to allow easy liaison with MI5 over the work of the double agents and would be headed by a man with unrivalled knowledge of Germany, Frank Foley, who had been the MI6 head of station in Berlin throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Foley, now better known for his role in helping tens of thousands of Jews to get to Palestine in contravention of the British rules, replaced Cowgill as the MI6 representative on the Twenty Committee. ‘There was an obvious qualitative difference in the way in which the committee worked from then on,’ one former MI5 officer said. ‘For the first time, the MI6 representative was speaking authoritatively because he was a real operational officer. He knew what he was talking about and it showed.’ Masterman, who as secretary of the Twenty Committee was in the perfect position to know, also pointed to the mid-1942 changes as the moment that the Double Cross system really began to take off. ‘Broadly speaking, bad men make good institutions bad and good men make bad institutions good,’ he said. ‘It cannot be denied that there was some friction between MI5 and MI6 in the early days, but this disappeared when the MI6 representative on the committee was changed.’

One of the major problems faced by those running the Double Cross system was that when the British tried to work out what the Germans would do next, they based their judgements on what they would have done in the same situation. But their opponents, and in particular Hitler, had a different view of things. ‘It is necessary for the deception
staff to think as the enemy thinks and to divorce themselves entirely from being influenced by what we would do if placed in what we imagine to be the enemy’s position,’ one former deception officer said. ‘Again and again, what the deceivers suggested was plausible to the enemy. But both our operations and intelligence staffs maintained that it was not because they were governed strictly by their appreciation of what we would think was plausible in the enemy’s place.’

Masterman had been a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War and he had a better grasp of the German way of thinking than most of the committee, but even he could not match the new MI6 representative. ‘Foley knew the Germans backwards,’ one former MI6 officer said. ‘So if people wanted to know how the Germans would react to any particular deception plan, they would naturally ask him.’ Foley swiftly succeeded in turning around the committee’s attitude to MI6, which had been so heavily tarnished by Cowgill’s restrictions. ‘He was not a member of the establishment clique,’ said another of Foley’s former colleagues. ‘But he was a pretty serious chap, feet on the ground, solid, very much the elder statesman, giving useful advice whenever called upon. His exceptional knowledge of the workings of, and personalities in, the
Abwehr
, acquired during years of service in Berlin, made him a tower of strength.’

By the spring of 1943, the Double Cross system had developed deception into a fine art. But one of the Twenty Club’s most famous achievements did not involve a double agent at all. The Allied forces were now mopping up in North Africa and preparing to invade southern Europe. The most obvious stepping stone was Sicily, just a short hop across the Mediterranean from Tunisia. The problem was to find a way of giving the Germans the impression that General Eisenhower and his British colleague General Alexander had other plans, forcing the Germans to reinforce other areas and weakening the defences in Sicily.

Charles Cholmondeley, the RAF representative on the Twenty Committee, devised Operation Mincemeat, a plan centred around the known level of collaboration between the Spanish authorities and the Germans. The idea was to drop the body of a dead ‘British officer’ off the coast of Spain, close enough to ensure it would be washed up on the beach, with the intention of making it look as if it had come from a crashed aircraft. He would be carrying documents indicating that the main thrust of the Allied attack would be somewhere other than
Sicily. The Spanish would be bound to pass these on to the Germans who would reinforce their garrisons in the suggested targets at the expense of the real one.

Montagu took charge of the operation, acquiring a suitable body from a London hospital and giving it the identity of Major William Martin, Royal Marines, an official courier. Attached to Martin’s wrist by a chain was a briefcase containing a number of documents, including a letter from one senior British general to another, discussing planned assaults on Greece and an unspecified location in the western Mediterranean, for which Sicily was to be a cover. A further letter from Lord Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations, referred jocularly to sardines, which was rightly thought enough of a hint to make the Germans believe the real attack was going to be on Sardinia. The members of the Twenty Committee were highly inventive in their choice of other documents to be planted on the body. Two ‘used’ West End theatre tickets for a few days before the intended launch of the body were in his pocket to show that he must have been travelling by air. A photograph of Martin’s ‘fiancée’, actually that of a female MI5 clerk, was placed in his wallet. For several weeks, Cholmondeley carried two love letters from the ‘fiancée’ around in his pocket to give them the proper crumpled look. There was even an irate letter from Martin’s bank manager.