X, Y & Z

by Dermot Turing

  • • •

  On 15 June 1942, Słowikowski, as the false Dr Skowroński, went to the American Consulate in Algiers to collect some cash and despatches which had arrived from London. Along with the despatches was a gentleman who introduced himself as Colonel Solborg, who brought greetings from Stanisław, thus establishing his connection with Stanisław Gano, the head of military intelligence in the Polish General Staff and the immediate boss of Mieczysław Słowikowski and his colleagues in France. Colonel Robert Solborg was not fake. He was a genuine Polish-speaking American whose job was to help President Roosevelt work out what was what in French North Africa.

  The two of them began with the map on the wall. Look, said Słowikowski, surely there is more we can do. The Mediterranean is naturally composed of two basins. In the East the Germans have naval and aerial control and have the British pinned down in defence of the Suez Canal. West of Malta there is no effective obstacle to convoys and the place is open to an invading force. So the Allies can occupy North Africa and use it as a jumping-off point to harry the Italians. Look how close Tunisia is to Italy! And if you play the scenario the other way, just look what a danger a German occupation of French North Africa would pose. Not just to Suez, but, by providing additional U-boat bases, to convoys across the South Atlantic. The strategic picture would be completely altered. And what do the intelligence reports suggest? Well, it’s evident that the Germans are thinking about taking control of the region.

  Słowikowski reported back to Stanisław on his meeting with Solborg. Central office did not deign to reply. Perhaps they knew that the Americans and the British thought Solborg a little too unreliable to involve in their network. For one thing, he was known to German intelligence. Worse, the guesswork in front of the map was far too close to the mark. Unknown to Słowikowski, it was the Allies, not the Germans, who were making plans. Winston Churchill had first thought of an American occupation of French North Africa the previous year, before the Americans were even in the war. Now, in mid 1942, those plans were given the go-ahead: the soldiers were to be trained to clamber down the sides of ships; the tanks were in production; the fleet was to be made ready. The operation was codenamed TORCH, and the intelligence from Słowikowski, in response to the endless questionnaires from London, was furnishing the details to ensure the action did not become a bloodbath on the beaches of Vichy-controlled French North Africa.

  • • •

  In France, Bertrand had been grumbling on and off to the British about sharing of Enigma settings. ‘Is it really true that you have no results on the E. machine or just that it is too tedious to send them to us?’ he asked on 6 December 1941. The complaint was repeated in March 1942: ‘it is impossible to accept that your A-team is getting no results… [to receive the E settings] would enable me to bring round to your cause certain of your former friends who seem to me to be inclining more towards you.’ Bletchley Park explained to ‘C’, the head of MI6, that they were sending Bertrand some minor Enigma settings ‘about twice a week’. In fact, nothing at all had been sent for over three months. The drip-feed was re-established, with sixteen settings, relating to the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front and the SS, sent between March and July. But for the British the security questions had not gone away. What they were sending was a tiny fraction of the GC&CS achievement. In February 1942, the British had found the settings for sixteen networks and decoded 41 per cent of the messages received. During the month of June, 261 lots of settings were found, using 11,833 hours of time on the Turing–Welchman Bombes. The sheer scale of the British operation made Bertie’s little outfit seem too small to bother with.27

  The balance between the two intelligence centres was made more even after 10 September 1942. On that day, Bertrand messaged London happily that he had just received three Enigma machines. No, Bertie had not been out on to the battlefield and captured this priceless kit; these machines were the ones he had ordered in May 1940 and Bertrand had now smuggled back enough parts to reassemble a fighting force of Enigmas. The first Polish-model replica Enigma machine had been demonstrated to Louis Rivet and his new commanding officer, General Roux, on 22 July 1942. Now, in September, Bertie explained to London that he had a ready-made solution to the challenge of secure communications. ‘Agreed in principle,’ responded an incredulous MI6, having consulted Bletchley, ‘but are your machines equipped with a Stecker [plugboard]?’ Indeed they were, and X and Z began to liaise with Y using the enemy’s machine. Henri Braquenié relished the irony of the situation. His messages to and from London were now being super-enciphered on a reconstituted Enigma machine and so he signed off his messages ‘Heil Hitler’. He knew the Germans wouldn’t be able to get anything out of the messages even if they could work out the Franco-British key, since the entire text was nothing but gobbledegook, even in the original: the plain text was decrypted German Enigma keys, and there was no way to make any sense of this incoherent jumble of stuff.28

  During Bertrand’s border-crossing trips to pick up Enigma parts, PC Cadix had been supervised by his wife Marie, called ‘Mary’ by everyone after she had been rechristened in the early days by the monoglot English. Mary was ‘respected and obeyed’ by all, probably because her firm grip was mellowed by a sense of humour, good looks and charm. Everyone wanted to please Mary. In songs (Ciężki and, in the days before the Lamoricière incident, Różycki, had good voices and were often called upon) she was called ‘notre chère princesse’.29 Mary was the glue that bound the men of PC Cadix into coherence.

  Behind the veneer of domesticity, the atmosphere at PC Cadix had not much improved during Maksymilian Ciężki’s absence, at least as far as the Polish group were concerned. There had been, for instance, a run-in between Gwido Langer and Bertrand about decrypted material which Langer sent to his superiors in London, but which Bertrand wanted to sell to the Swiss. Bertrand had already put in place a broking scheme about other messages and that was far more inflammatory. This scheme was called Liaison 414 and the occasion for an even bigger dust-up.30

  Liaison 414 was the fruit of listening in on an agent working for the German counter-intelligence organisation called the Abwehr. Over 150 telegrams emanating from this source had been intercepted and decrypted during the course of 1942. Unusually, they were in French, and they related to Russian affairs. Bertrand’s ploy had been to sell the intelligence, via Vichy, to the USSR.31 Like Vichy itself, Moscow found the subject of who was spying on it, and how, and what they wanted to know, to be of irresistible fascination. As John Colville noted, however, anything helpful for the Russians was likely to be regarded at the least with distaste, and probably as toxic, by the Poles.

  There was also a simmering disagreement between the Poles and Bertrand over North Africa and the future of the Ekspozytura 300 team. The Polish intelligence workers had been in the open prison of the Château des Fouzes for nearly two years, but the dynamic of the war was changing. Wiktor Michałowski noted how the French had the jitters and their tension was rubbing off on his own compatriots at the Château des Fouzes.32 It was bearable, but it seemed a long time since those light-hearted days of chasing one another around the grounds and hiding in earthenware jars. Other Polish agents who had stayed behind in France had been feeling the pressure more directly. In August 1942, there had been arrests and the erasure of networks. Conditions were getting harder for anyone with Resistance sympathies and it was harder still for foreigners. Just what was going to happen next was difficult to predict. Even Gustave Bertrand was finding it difficult to anticipate the future and to remain afloat in the slippery, poisonous bowl of Vichysoisse politics.

  • • •

  In July 1942, Colonel Louis Rivet was summoned to see Prime Minister Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy government, to receive an instruction.33 Rivet’s anti-German activities were to cease. Laval also told Rivet that his government had agreed with the Germans on ‘joint policing’ in the Zone Libre. A creeping takeover of the Zone Libre by the Germans had begun.

&
nbsp; Rivet was called to another meeting on 29 August 1942.34 This time there was an almighty row about arrests, intelligence and loyalties, and another reconstruction of the Vichy government’s intelligence services. The Bureau des Menées Antinationales was abolished. Bertrand’s secret code-breaking section, MA2, must surely perish with it. Rivet was replaced, effective 1 September 1942. New organs, under firmer control by Laval, were to take over intelligence work. Astonishingly, in their ignorance of what it did, Bertrand’s outfit was allowed to survive, renamed as ‘Section ET’ and continuing as before. Laval’s grip was not as complete as he imagined.35 Moreover, the wily Admiral François Darlan, Laval’s predecessor as Prime Minister (seen by the Germans as less biddable than Laval), had plans of his own. Although Rivet thought Darlan was difficult to read and was playing both sides, Rivet accepted a role working for Darlan.36

  Bertrand, like Darlan, was trying to see what was happening on both sides of the line that divided France. It was an open secret that the Allies were planning an intervention, either in North Africa or in the south of France. The fog surrounding the invasion meant that the target was unknown until the very last minute. What was more certain was how the Germans would react to an invasion. As the south of France had to be on the Allied list of possible targets, sooner or later, and likely sooner, the Germans would take over the Zone Libre; a prospect that everyone was talking about.37

  On 3 September 1942, Bertrand went to Paris for another chat with Max, his spy in the German Embassy. He learned that the Germans would automatically take over the Zone Libre, even if the Allied target was North Africa. Two divisions had been assembled near Dijon and these would co-ordinate with the Italians moving from the south-east. London was notified. In turn, Bertrand was given a code-phrase and some advice. The code: if he received a message saying, ‘La récolte est bonne’ [the harvest is good] then an invasion – of somewhere – was imminent. The advice: get the Polish team evacuated to Algiers now. If that proved to be unachievable, the British would mount a seaborne rescue in one of three named places, with Bertrand and his wife to follow by air pick-up.38

  • • •

  Dilly Knox, the man who taught Alan Turing about code-breaking and the person who so nearly jeopardised the transfer of Enigma secrets in those long-ago meetings with the Poles, had been working on a very special Enigma problem. In the autumn of 1941, Knox began working on one of the ‘outlying German Enigmas’ which defied regular lines of attack.39 This was the machine used by Abwehr agents and it was completely different from the army/air force machine and different again from that used by the U-boats. With a combination of insight and serendipity, which so often provides breakthroughs in cipher problems, Knox had reverse-engineered the machine. It had no plugboard, but four rotors, and the rotors had multiple ‘turnover’ notches which would engage the next wheel. Gloriously, Knox showed that the turnover pattern meant that rather frequently all four rotors could turn over together, thus preserving the entire wiring sequence of the machine for successive enciphered letters. Where this happened either side of the four-letter indicator sequence – a phenomenon Knox called a ‘lobster’, for reasons long lost to history – it gave him the way in he needed. The women at Bletchley Park recruited by Knox were sent on a lobster hunt, which trapped enough information to work out the wiring of the rotors and their turnover patterns. One rotor had eleven notches, another fifteen, another seventeen. By the end of 1941, the Abwehr Enigma was wide open and generating a new species of intelligence called ‘ISK’, standing for Intelligence Services Knox (or possibly ‘Illicit’ Services Knox, in view of the fact that some Abwehr operatives had been in Britain before they were rounded up).

  By 1942, as far as the British were concerned there were no effective Abwehr operatives left in Britain, but the story was different elsewhere. ISK was beginning to get some useful material from their activities in continental Europe. There were Abwehr spies along the north coast of Africa, whose secret findings were all about the fog of war and no secret at all:

  Madrid to Tangier. 29 September at 1350 hrs 7 Escort boats left from BASTA. When passed and to where? [messaged Control to an Abwehr watcher]

  Tangier to Madrid. From 13 to 17 hours thick fog and rain [replied the agent the next day]. Absolutely no visibility.

  Tangier to Madrid. V894, whose reports almost always mix fantasy and truth, signals that on 4 November in BASTA 50 heavy American bombers arrived, and in the night of 4 to 5 November 12 units of the American fleet with troops.40

  The intelligence gleaned from Knox’s pencil-and-paper methods was helping to build a picture of what the Germans knew – and, just as important, what they did not know – about the plans for Operation TORCH. And there was one fact which, crucially, they did not know.

  Monitoring the shipping commentary was not the headline success of ISK in the autumn of 1942. Ahead of TORCH, the Allies were implementing Operation OVERTHROW. Operation OVERTHROW involved more Abwehr spies, old-fashioned spies who watch things and report to their superiors. In the case of OVERTHROW, the spies were working for Nazi Germany and they were reporting in alarmed tones on the build-up of strength in Britain. Troops were being trained for mountain and arctic warfare and aggregations of units were massing in the south-east. The inference was clear: an imminent invasion of Norway and probably a cross-channel invasion of France. Stalin was going to get his Second Front now. And it was tosh, all falsehood, served up with a garnish of real facts, by the ‘London Controlling Section’ responsible for deception. The spies in question were run by London, not Berlin. Not only that, but the tosh was being swallowed. ISK decrypts followed the Germans as they digested the stories they were being fed, and the British authorities knew that the Germans didn’t have a clue what was actually going to happen.

  • • •

  Colonel Paul Paillole had taken control of one of the new intelligence organisations set up by Laval in August 1942.41 Some of the intelligence he was reading was very strange: 200 blank identity cards had been signed out by the police ministry and handed to the Gestapo; twenty-three car registration numbers had been reserved by a certain Captain Desloges; the same officer had requisitioned the Château de Charbonnières near Lyon; and the threads all led back to Desloge’s commanding officer, General Delmotte, chef de cabinet of the Vichy Secretary of State for War. Paillole requested a meeting with the general to find out what was going on. Delmotte admitted frankly that the Abwehr wanted to track down radio transmissions coming from the Zone Libre. The Germans had not only intercepted transmissions; they had deciphered them and they knew there were cells in the region, working for the British undercover. The nests of anti-Nazi activity had to be stamped out. Contrary to the stipulations of the armistice, ‘joint policing’ in the Zone Libre meant that the Germans had been given permission to operate mobile radio direction-finding vans. The Château de Charbonnières was their headquarters, the operatives had fake French identities and the new branch of German counter-intelligence was called the Funkabwehr.42

  The net began to close more tightly around the Poles left behind in France. Radio transmitters were captured in October at Caluire and Rochetaillée. And the same happened, with the arrest of British and French operators, at Feyzin. All three places were close to the château HQ of the Funkabwehr. On 23 October 1942, the Funkabwehr ventured further afield to Châtelguyon, not far from Vichy, where they made another kill: a team of Poles belonging to Ekspozytura F was arrested.

  Gwido Langer requested guidance from London. Should he stay, bearing in mind that protecting the Poles of Équipe Z was unlikely to be a priority for the French if and when the Germans took over completely? The answer came on 28 October 1942. Only if the French put up a fight should he stay. Maybe a few radio operators could stay, but it was time for the rest of Équipe Z to prepare for disbandment and escape. The arrangements would be made by Dunderdale and relayed via Bertrand.43

  Then there was another row between Langer and Bertrand, the biggest dust-up yet. In a
ccordance with his directions from London, Langer intended that the evacuation would be to Algiers. Bertrand said no: that was too dangerous. Langer, primed with secret intelligence unknown to Bertrand, dug in his heels. But Bertrand said his own sources in Vichy confirmed his view. That settled it. And in reality, if Bertrand said no, Langer could do nothing whatever about it.

  It was bad enough having rows with people supposed to be on your own side. The real enemy were about to make it a great deal worse.

  On 25 September 1942, Bertrand had visited Nîmes. There he learned that the Funkabwehr had established itself in a new location, this time much closer to home, at Montpellier, about 70km to the south-west of Uzès. Twelve local registration numbers had been provided for their interception vans. Within three weeks, a detachment had set up in Pont-Saint-Esprit, 40km north-east of Uzès, in the opposite direction. Soon after, one of the vans was spotted on the road leading north-west out of Uzès to Alès. The Funkabwehr were triangulating on PC Cadix.

  From time to time, the power in the building would falter, co-inciding with the timing of transmissions, probably to see whether they ceased when the lights went out. The Funkabwehr were homing in.

  Gustave Bertrand had been seeing the omens for some time. St Odile, the patron saint of Alsace, had apparently seen it for herself as long ago as AD 890, and her prophecy had been handed down the generations: terrible violence would be inflicted on the world by Germania, with its apex of success in the sixth month of the second year of the war, which was about now if you started the clock in May 1940. And then there had been the birds. A Hitchcockian gathering of nightingales congregated on the telegraph wires around the Château des Fouzes in mid October. The rumours about a total occupation of France reached fever pitch in November. And now the special coded message came to Bertie from London. La récolte est bonne. It was time for Bertrand, Langer and their team of code-crackers to pack up and go.44