The Defence of the Realm (55 page)

Though the implementation of Operation MINCEMEAT was not MI5's responsibility, it provided considerable assistance. Montagu invited secretaries in B Division to submit photographs from which he chose a suitable candidate to become ‘Major Martin's' fiancée, ‘Pam'. His choice fell on a B1b secretary. An attractive photograph of her in a swimsuit was placed in ‘Martin's' wallet.
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Other secretaries helped draft love letters
from ‘Pam' to place in ‘Martin's' pocket.
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The photograph in ‘Martin's' identity card was of a B1a officer, Ronnie Reed, who bore some resemblance to the unfortunate Glyndwr Michael.
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‘Martin's' pockets also contained stubs of London theatre tickets dated 22 April, as evidence that he had left England after that date.
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In reality, the corpse had been loaded several days earlier on to the submarine, HMS
Seraph
, which took it to the Spanish coast. On 22 April Montagu and Cholmondeley presented the secretaries mainly responsible for the love letters and the swimsuit photograph with the theatre tickets whose stubs had been planted on the corpse, and the four of them celebrated ‘Bill Martin's farewell' with a show and dinner.
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Just over a week later, on 30 April, the corpse was picked up offshore near Huelva by a local sardine fisherman. Though the body was handed over to the British for burial, pro-German Spanish officials, as expected, allowed the Abwehr to photograph the documents in the briefcase. Among them were letters by Mountbatten and the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye, as well as proofs of a manual on Combined Operations to which Eisenhower had, supposedly, been asked to write a foreword. The letters falsely indicated that the Allies were planning a landing in Greece, codenamed Operation HUSKY. Soon afterwards ULTRA decrypts revealed that the Germans had been comprehensively deceived. A message sent to Churchill during a visit to Washington said simply: ‘MINCEMEAT swallowed rod, line and sinker.' Even when the Allied attack came in Sicily rather than Greece, the Germans did not doubt the authenticity of the MINCEMEAT documents but concluded that Allied plans had changed.
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The preparations for Operation MINCEMEAT persuaded the head of the Security Executive, Duff Cooper, that the time had come to brief Churchill on some of the other deceptions devised by B1a and the double agents which it ran.
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As late as March 1943, Guy Liddell noted in his diary that the Prime Minister, despite his regular meetings with ‘C' and close interest in the work of Bletchley Park and SOE, still knew nothing about Security Service operations.
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The double-agent case chosen by Duff Cooper as most likely to enthuse the Prime Minister during his first briefing on the work of B1a was that of Eddie Chapman.
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Before the war Chapman had been a flamboyant London career criminal, who drove a Bentley and dressed in Savile Row suits. While on the run from the Met in 1939, he fled to Jersey where he was jailed for house-breaking and larceny. His fortunes were changed by the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Chapman's offer to spy for Germany after his release from prison was
eventually accepted by the Abwehr. In the early hours of 16 December 1942 he was dropped by parachute over the Cambridgeshire countryside, equipped with false identity cards, £990 in used notes, a wallet taken from a dead British soldier, a radio set and a suicide pill. By morning he had contacted the local police and told them he wished to tell his story to the ‘British Intelligence Service'. Chapman was taken to Camp 020, where it took the commandant, Tin-eye Stephens, only a few days to turn him into a double agent, codenamed ZIGZAG. Though no detailed account survives of Churchill's briefing on ZIGZAG, the Prime Minister was almost certainly told that early in 1943 he had carried out a sabotage operation against the de Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield which built the Mosquito bombers then pounding German cities. Dramatic photographs were taken of wrecked factory buildings covered in tarpaulins with debris strewn around. ZIGZAG's exultant German case officer, Stephan von Gröning, comfortably ensconced in a large mansion at the French port of Nantes, celebrated by ordering ‘champagne all round'. At a secret ceremony in Oslo later in 1943 ZIGZAG became the first British subject to be awarded the Iron Cross in recognition of his ‘outstanding zeal and success'. The ‘sabotage' of the de Havilland factory, however, was a hoax, orchestrated by B1a.
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The second case on which Churchill was briefed by Duff Cooper in March 1943 was that of a senior Abwehr officer, codenamed HARLEQUIN, who had been captured in North Africa in November 1942 and brought to Britain as a POW. Though it was not possible to run him as a double agent, since the Germans knew he had been taken prisoner:

he was turned round to a point where, convinced of the inevitability of a German defeat, he placed in our hands a written offer of his services, subject only to the reservation that he should not be compelled to take up arms against the German Forces. He has supplied a wealth of intelligence, much of which is subject to check [that is, can be corroborated], though this fact is unknown to him. He has also been used in a consultative capacity and has contributed helpful and informative comments on cases submitted to him.
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The Security Service believed that HARLEQUIN had ‘a none too rigid conscience' and had agreed to co-operate partly because he lacked the ‘moral courage' to face up to life as a POW and wanted the war over as quickly as possible. But Petrie reported in April: ‘So far he has played well by us and it is anticipated that provided we hold to our side of the bargain he will continue to do so.'
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Struck by Churchill's evident fascination with ZIGZAG, HARLEQUIN
and other colourful MI5 operations, Duff Cooper proposed that the Security Service send the Prime Minister a monthly report of two or three pages.
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Like Petrie, Liddell was anxious that Churchill might be carried away by what he read: ‘There are obvious advantages in selling ourselves to the PM who at the moment knows nothing about our department. On the other hand, he may, on seeing some particular item, go off the deep end and want to take action, which will be disastrous to the work in hand.'
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On balance, largely in the interests of Security Service staff, Petrie decided in favour of a monthly report to Churchill:

It is a disadvantage of Security work, by and large, that the results are apt to be mainly negative, that is to say the better it is done, the less there is to show for it. Also from its very nature, its secrets can be confided only to the few. It is only fair, therefore, that the good work of the Service, to which I would like to pay my own tribute, should be brought to the notice of the Prime Minister and certain other high quarters.
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The Service leadership was particularly concerned by the likely reaction of the Labour Home Secretary in Churchill's coalition government, Herbert Morrison. A meeting of Liddell, Dick White, Tar Robertson and Roger Hollis agreed not to include counter-subversion in the monthly reports, on the grounds that ‘The PM might speak to the Home Secretary about it and if the latter was not also informed we should find ourselves in trouble.'
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Their reluctance to send reports on subversion to Morrison was heavily influenced by the Zec case in the previous year. In March 1942 the Home Secretary had been enraged by a cartoon by Philip Zec in the
Daily Mirror
, showing a torpedoed sailor, his face smeared with oil, lying on a raft in the Atlantic. Morrison interpreted the cartoon, probably wrongly, as implying that the sailor's life had been sacrificed to increase oil companies' profits. Though no evidence survives in Security Service files, it seems likely that Morrison asked the Service to investigate.
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Probably fearful of provoking more demands for more investigations of alleged subversives, the Service leadership decided that the monthly reports to Churchill should be confined, almost exclusively, to its role in the war against the Axis powers. For the first monthly report, the various sections of the Service (excluding Hollis's) produced drafts totalling about sixteen single-spaced typed pages. Anthony Blunt prepared a précis, and the final draft of about two and a half pages was produced in collaboration between him and Dick White.
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Since Blunt continued to draft the monthly reports to Churchill for the remainder of the war,
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it is highly probable they went to Soviet intelligence as well – and quite possibly to Stalin personally.
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Indeed,

Extract from first monthly ‘Report on Activities of Security Service', dealing mainly with counter-espionage and double agents, submitted to the Prime Minister in the spring of 1943. Churchill was much impressed and annotated ‘deeply interesting. WSC' at the end. Since the draft reports were prepared by Anthony Blunt, copies may well have gone to Stalin also.

Moscow may well also have received the longer version before it was condensed by Blunt and thus have seen more detailed reports than Churchill.

The first monthly ‘Report on Activities of Security Service', submitted on 26 March 1943,
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was an instant success with the Prime Minister.
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Churchill wrote on it in red ink: ‘deeply interesting'.
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Henceforth, Petrie wrote later, Churchill ‘took a sustained personal interest in our work'.
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The first report began with a summary of counter-espionage successes since the outbreak of war:

In all 126 spies have fallen into our hands. Of these eighteen gave themselves up voluntarily; twenty-four have been found amenable and are now being used as double-cross agents. Twenty-eight have been detained at overseas stations, and eight were arrested on the high seas. In addition twelve real, and seven imaginary persons have been foisted upon the enemy as double-cross spies. Thirteen spies have been executed, and a fourteenth is under trial.

As examples of how comprehensively the Germans were being deceived by the ‘double-cross spies', the Report revealed that GARBO (like other agents, not identified by name) had been sent £2,500, as well as having a further 250,000 pesetas put at his disposal in Madrid by the Abwehr, and that a radio set of new design, sabotage equipment and £200 in banknotes had been dropped by parachute in Aberdeenshire for MUTT and JEFF.
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The case which Churchill seems to have found of greatest interest in the first monthly report was that of HARLEQUIN, and he asked for more information from MI5 on the intelligence HARLEQUIN had provided.
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On the additional report submitted to him, Churchill marked the following passage in red: ‘HARLEQUIN states that when the German [1942] summer offensive failed to bring about the annihilation of the Russian armies, every single officer of the Abwehr was convinced, as was HARLEQUIN, that Germany had lost the war.' The Abwehr believed that the growing superiority of arms production by the Grand Alliance (the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union) made its victory inevitable.
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Two months later, however, the Security Service reported to Churchill that, though HARLEQUIN had provided ‘invaluable' intelligence, he had ceased to co-operate, had put on his German military uniform and had been sent to a POW camp:

He asked to be released from his bargain because it had become evident to him that the Allies were determined to impose crushing terms on a defeated Germany and he did not want to feel that he had played any part in bringing about the oppression of the German people.
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The written reports to Churchill did not, however, mention that after his capture HARLEQUIN had been assured by military intelligence that, in return for his co-operation, he would be allowed to travel to a neutral country to meet the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, whom he saw as ‘the centre of a future anti-Nazi organisation' which would succeed the Hitler regime. After reading British press reports in April that Canaris had been dismissed, HARLEQUIN abandoned his plan and lost interest in co-operation with the Security Service. The press reports, however, had been planted by the Political Warfare Executive. Though Canaris's influence was being rapidly supplanted by that of Himmler, he was not dismissed as head of the Abwehr for another year. The Service regarded HARLEQUIN's decision to cease co-operation as ‘singularly fortuitous', since it had no interest in his scheme to meet Canaris and believed it had already obtained ‘all but an infinitesimal part' of the intelligence he was able to provide.
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