by Nigel West
Other sources confirmed that Fidrmuc’s principal handler was Otto Kamler, head of the Lisbon KO’s Abt. I, who employed his secretary, Lillie Kraatz, as an intermediary.
Schreiber also told his interrogators that (although he had joined the Nazi Party in 1933) he was an anti-Nazi who, he suspected, had been posted to Portugal deliberately so there would be someone in Lisbon on whom the 20 July plotters could depend during the attempted putsch.14 His version of events disclosed the internal disruption caused by the absorption of the Abwehr into the RHSA and the impact of the 20 July plot on I-H’s ability to function:
One of the duties within the scope of Scheiber’s Berlin activities from 1940 to 1943 (Abwehr I-H West KO) was the arranging of journeys to Switzerland, Spain and Portugal for persons designated by his superior officer, General Oster.
From the type of persons for whom passage was arranged and from the general talk in the offices of the Berlin Abwehr, he became aware of activities and feelings in this higher echelon which were distinctly contrary to the official guiding principles of the party and the SD. It was obvious that the general attitude of Abwehr Chief Canaris, his chief of staff General Oster, the latter’s aide Dr von Dohnányi and rest of the other higher Abwehr officials was becoming more and more antagonistic towards the Gestapo, the SD and the RSHA in general. From 1941 on there grew up an ever-increasing opposition, although outward appearances were kept up in the necessary official cooperation. Antagonism became all the more evident in the Abwehr staff as the plans of the RSHA to swallow up the Abwehr department won ground. The struggle was accompanied by a collection of evidence on both sides, although, of course, the Abwehr continued to lose ground. When it finally was absorbed by the RSHA and renamed the Milltaerisches Amt, it still remained under the purely military direction of Colonel Hansen.
This final step in the dissolution of the Abwehr was the result of several years of anti-Abwehr legislation, instigated by the RSHA, beginning in December 1942 when Chief of Abwehr I, Colonel Piekenbrock, was promoted to General and given command of a division in the East. Colonel Maurer, Chief of I-H West, was relieved and given reserve status, as was General Oster some time later. Dr von Dohnányi was removed in the summer of 1943 and Admiral Canaris was finally forced to resign at the beginning of 1944.
Schreiber feels that an even closer check and increased penetration of the Mil Amt by the SD took place after the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, which resulted in the arrest and conviction of the more important remaining officers, among others. Chief of the Mil Amt, Colonel Hansen, Chief of Abwehr I, Colonel Kuebart, and his adjutant, Sonderdführer Weis.
Effects of these drastic changes in Berlin were hardly felt within Schreiber’s field of activity in Portugal. Methods and channels used for reporting remained basically unchanged; working relations with Berlin rather slowed down, owing to the chiefs’ distrust of everything that had existed before. Neither in 1944 nor in 1945 did the new chiefs visit the Lisbon referat.
Schreiber states that in 1941 or 1942 he learned unofficially that certain individuals and groups of persecuted people were being given the opportunity of escaping to neutral countries, chiefly to Switzerland. Such actions necessitating particular secrecy were neither handled in the customary way nor were the formalities arranged by Schreiber’s office, but directly by those initially responsible, i.e, Canaris and particularly Oster. Schreiber recalls that Dr Hans Bernd Gisevius, acting on instructions from Canaris and Oster, was responsible for some 33 Jews successfully reaching Switzerland, and also had something to do with several other similar cases. He knows definitely, from his official work in Berlin, that Dr Gisevius as consul general in Switzerland was working for Canaris and Oster and received his instructions directly from them.
In the summer of 1942 Schreiber received direct instructions from Hans Oster concerning the emigration of a lawyer, Dr Weis, his Jewish wife and two children. Since the Abwehr’s power to assert itself had already deteriorated at the time, negotiations with the different competent offices of the RSHA were tedious and at times threatened to fail. It was managed at the last moment, however, and the Weis family left Germany in the winter of 1942. Weis expressed his thanks to Schreiber in a letter shortly before he left and presented Schreiber with a book containing a dedication for the personal trouble he had taken.
In June 1943 Schreiber was summoned by the Reichskriegsgericht, in connection with accusations against General Oster, and held under suspicion of aiding, abetting and camouflaging the illegal departure of Dr Weis and family. Through documents concerning the incident which still existed at the OKW, Schreiber succeeded in exonerating himself, at least outwardly proving that he had only followed orders. It was shortly afterward that Schreiber took up his new position in Lisbon. He believes that Oster was eventually convicted on numerous charges of treason and executed, but since he left for Lisbon a few weeks later, he is uncertain about Oster’s fate.
In August 1943, shortly before Schreiber’s departure for Portugal, he was summoned to report to Chief Abwehr I, Colonel Hansen, and was thoroughly questioned concerning his general political attitude and the war as a whole. In subsequent conversations with Colonel Kuebart, his adjutant Weiss (not the Weis mentioned above), Colonel Dr Thoering, and Hansen’s adjutant, Major Dr Rumrow, he became convinced that something was being planned that would relieve the tension which existed between the various high authorities. He was told that Hansen had a leading position in the movement. He was under the impression that they wished to ascertain exactly who belonged to them in sentiment, so they would know on whom they could count when called upon.
In June 1944 he made a trip to Madrid and met Colonel Kuebart and his adjutant Weiss there. He was informed that Kuebart planned a trip to Portugal sometime in July and Schreiber was instructed to make the necessary arrangements. He made preparations and reported to Berlin that everything was ready. The date of the journey was postponed several times and finally fixed for one of the days around 20 July 1944. Immediately after the assassination attempt all frontiers were closed, and Kuebart found himself unable to leave Germany. A few days later he was arrested, together with Weis.
Toward the end of August 1944 Schreiber was ordered to Berlin to make a statement regarding Kuebart’s projected entry into Portugal on 20 July and the preparations he had made for it. Since Kuebart had at the time given official reasons for the preparations, a detailed account to this effect sufficed and Schreiber was permitted to return to Lisbon.
Thus, according to Schreiber, at the very moment when the Abwehr should have been focused on the enemy’s intentions, before and after the Normandy landings, the organisation had been riven by dissent, plots, arrests and collapsing morale.
The Allied effort to piece together the full story of the enemy’s activities in the western Mediterranean took much time and perseverance, but gradually the interrogation reports were integrated with the decrypts, information from double agents and defector testimony, to reveal the true extent of the Nazi espionage networks. For example, MI5’s file on Knappe-Ratey had been compiled from numerous overlapping sources, recording his birth in Madrid in March 1914, and his espionage role. In July 1941 a Croatian refugee, Maria Marek, had confessed to MI5 that she had been recruited in Madrid as a German spy and taught to communicate using secret ink. Initially code-named KISSMEQUICK, which changed to THE SNARK, Marek arrived in London in July 1941 to work as a domestic servant and described her training sessions at a safe house on the second floor at Calle de Viriato 73, which had been supervised by an Abwehr technician, introduced as ALPHONSE, and his superior officer, code-named FEDERICO who matched previous descriptions of Knappe-Ratey.
In July 1941 a Polish Air Force cadet, Edward Ejsymont, admitted while sailing to England from Gibraltar on the Cunard troopship HMT Scythia that he had been in touch with the Abwehr in Madrid. Upon his arrival he was interrogated at Camp 020, where he made a detailed statement, describing how he had visited the German embassy to be received by the
military attaché, Colonel Walter Bruns, who had handed him over to Knappe-Ratey. There then followed four or five further meetings, which were held at the Calle de Viriato safe house. Eventually MI5, having identified the young Pole in the ISOS traffic as a spy code-named KORAP, was satisfied that Ejsymont had told the truth, despite having been denounced by three of his Polish travelling companions, and he was enrolled as a double agent code-named CARELESS.15 In that capacity he wrote letters in secret writing under MI5’s supervision to the Abwehr in Madrid until January 1943, when his erratic behaviour required his imprisonment, thus terminating the case.
When GARBO was questioned by SIS’s Gene Risso-Gill in Portugal he recalled how he had met FEDERICO at the same address in May 1941 after a mission to Lisbon to collect a visa. He described how he had called at the German embassy to see his regular contact, George Lang, but instead had been seen by Knappe-Ratey, alias FEDERICO, who became his handler thereafter, and supplied him with the address, ‘Araceli Gonzalez, Calle de Viriato 73/2’ for future correspondence, one of eleven cover addresses or mail drops he was given in Madrid. GARBO was unlikely to forget this one, as Araceli Gonzalez was his wife’s maiden name.
Early in February 1942 José (‘Pepe’) Brugada, an MI5 double agent inside the Spanish embassy in London, code-named PEPPERMINT, reported that during a recent trip to Spain he had been introduced to two Abwehr officers, one named García, alias PABLO, and his subordinate, Lopez alias FEDERICO. From Brugada’s detailed description, MI5 identified the pair as Kuhlenthal and Knappe-Ratey. Later in February 1942 the ABC correspondent Luis Calvo was arrested in London and explained how, while in Madrid the previous month, he had been invited to Angel Alcazar de Velasco’s apartment to meet FEDERICO and PABLO, and subsequently had attended two more meetings with them at Calle de Viriato, 73. In November 1942 the Catalan activist Jaime Ribas told MI5 that during the seven months he was in Madrid persuading the Abwehr to send him to London, ostensibly to spy but actually to continue his campaigning against the Franco regime, he had heard about an officer known as FEDERICO who allegedly acted as a liaison between the German and Spanish authorities.
In November 1943 SIS detailed how a seaman, José María Martínez Carretero, who had smuggled a German wireless transmitter aboard his ship, the Cabo de Hornos, had been scheduled to meet FEDERICO in Madrid upon his arrival on 26 September. Another decrypt, dated around March 1944, showed that Timoteo Brenlla, a courier on the Cabo de Hornos, ‘had asked FEDERICO for a better job’ but had been rebuffed, thereby forcing him to resume his former employment on the Cabo de Bueno Esperanza.
As well as these pieces of the jigsaw, there was a quantity of ISOS intercepts mentioning Knappe-Ratey’s transfer in the summer of 1943 from I-H to the Bureau Felipe, and then a series of messages marking his frequent visits to Lisbon and Bilbao. When fitted together, the component parts provided a useful profile of the 29-year-old Abwehr officer who was Kuhlenthal’s trusted assistant and the designated handler of numerous agents, several of which were actually deceiving him and acting as double agents. Into this category fell GARBO, PEPPERMINT, THE SNARK and CARELESS, so he probably had good reason to consider himself a success, apparently suffering only the loss of the Spanish journalist Luis Calvo, who was detained by MI5 in London. In reality, of course, all his other sources were operating under MI5’s strict supervision.
Calvo’s arrest would have serious, unexpected consequences, because when he effectively compromised the Calle de Viriato cover address, MI5 realised that it would ordinarily become the subject of attention by the British postal censorship authorities. Accordingly, some of GARBO’s letters necessarily went astray, as though they had been seized by the censors, but the Abwehr was not alarmed because GARBO had always taken the precaution of not including anything in the text that might give him away. Accordingly, the loss of Calvo through his detention in London did not have a domino effect on Knappe-Ratey’s other agents, but did put MI5 in the unusual position of seeking to protect the Abwehr’s interests.
The isolation of British intelligence in the Iberian peninsula was relieved somewhat in April 1942 with the establishment at the US embassies in Lisbon and Madrid of OSS missions. These proved a somewhat mixed blessing as the personnel were not cleared for ISOS and therefore had only a limited view of the true counter-intelligence picture, and their activities were strictly curtailed by the hostility of the State Department and the local ambassadors. Operations conducted in Madrid by the OSS representative, the Chicago businessman Donald Steele, who had participated in the 1919 Archangel expedition against the Bolsheviks, were supervised from Portugal by Robert Solborg. After Steele’s withdrawal he was replaced by an international lawyer, H. Gregory Thomas, the pre-war president of Guerlin Inc. Having been educated at Cambridge, the Sorbonne and the University of Salamanca, Thomas spoke numerous languages and attempted to improve relations with the Spanish, and his own ambassador, despite some embarrassments caused by subordinates sponsoring the infiltration of Communist opponents of the regime into Malaga.
Despite the adverse conditions, X-2 in Lisbon would eventually index 1,900 enemy agents and list some 300 enemy officials. Similarly, in Madrid the OSS mission catalogued 3,000 agents, 400 officials, and some fifty suspect businesses. Of particular interest to OSS’s Research & Analysis branch were the economic transactions conducted with the Nazis, and SAFEHAVEN, the illicit disposal of Reich assets. Meanwhile, OSS’s Secret Intelligence branch concentrated on MORO, an investigation into reports of German aircraft being serviced at Spanish airfields, and the alleged refuelling of U-boats in Spanish harbours.
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In Gibraltar some ten double agents were managed by the DSO’s tiny staff in a highly successful effort to thwart the Abwehr’s attempts to infiltrate saboteurs on to the Rock. A few enemy bombs did detonate, and one destroyed a fuel deport on Coaling Island in June 1943 despite advance notice that a device had been smuggled across the Spanish frontier. This was but one of several lapses in an uneven conflict in which the Italian, German, Spanish and Falange intelligence agencies were pitted against MI5’s Defence Security Officer (DSO), two local Intelligence Corps Field Security Sections (FSS 54 in the town and FSS 97 at the dockyard) and the Gibraltar Security Police (GSP), a unit founded by MI5’s Tim Airey with twelve men in 1938. In contrast, their Axis adversaries enjoyed the advantage of working in a sympathetic security environment, protected by the regional Spanish authorities, and based at sites commanding views overlooking Algeciras Bay with excellent eye lines across Gibraltar’s anchorages, known locally as ‘spy row’.
Economically, the British enclave was dependent upon some 10,000 Spanish workers who streamed across the Four Pillars border daily from La Linea. Many were employed in the naval dockyard, where there was little opportunity to conceal the arrival and departure of Allied convoys, warships, tankers, freighters and other vulnerable shipping. Aircraft arriving and taking off at the airfield, constructed on reclaimed land close to the frontier, operated in full view of strategically placed enemy observation posts. As night fell, the Royal Navy launched patrols to deter hostile swimmers equipped with limpet mines, but many vessels suffered significant damage during a long period when Italian divers operating from an ostensibly abandoned tanker eluded detection and swam to their targets with impunity.
The burden of responsibility fell mainly on the DSO, Colonel H.G. (‘Tito’) Medlam, who supervised a cadre of trusted personnel to counter the Axis offensive, and adopted the imaginative strategy of penetrating the adversary with the objective of learning their intentions and interdicting their schemes. His staff consisted of his deputy, Philip Kirby Green, a former Scotland Yard detective and talented artist who had graduated from Cambridge with a Double First in History, and his assistant David Scherr, of Jewish heritage, who was fluent in Spanish. A graduate of London University, Scherr had been teaching in Runcorn before he was called up and assigned to the Intelligence Corps.16
Working in parallel, and sometimes in isolat
ion, was the Secret Intelligence Service station in Gibraltar, headed by John Codrington, and his Section V representatives, Desmond Bristow and Aelred O’Shagar. SIS operated principally outside the Rock, and Section V was the sole custodian of ISOS that was received from England. While MI5 and SIS shared responsibility for the fortress’ security, there were other branches of British intelligence, such as the Escape and Evasion Service (MI9), represented by Donald Darling; the Naval Intelligence Division, and Special Operations Executive (SOE), headed by Peter Quennell at the Villa Lourdes, with competing interests operating locally.
Gibraltar’s unique strategic location made it a focus of attention for the Germans, who planned to seize the Rock; the Italians, who were determined to eliminate the threat posed by the Royal Navy’s control of the Straits; and Spain, which coveted the fortress and resented British influence in the area, being especially sensitive about Morocco. From an intelligence perspective, Gibraltar exercised total control over transits to and from the Mediterranean, and the Naval Intelligence Division routinely acted as the executive arm by searching suspicious vessels, seizing contraband and interviewing suspect crew and passengers.
Virtually surrounded by enemies, the British garrison was extremely isolated, and reliant on some vehicles from Madrid, a few clandestine boats operating up the coastline to southern France, and very limited air traffic from England, which took a route far into the Atlantic to avoid interception by enemy aircraft based along the French coast.
For the Germans, Gibraltar represented a priority target for intelligence collection, principally about Allied air and shipping movements; for sabotage with so many tempting ammunition dumps, fuel depots and warships on full display; and for counter-espionage, seeking to exploit British countermeasures by penetrating local agent networks. Either by policy or expedience, the head of the KO’s Abt. II, Friedrich Baumann, sub-contracted operations against Gibraltar to a collection of Spanish army officers headed by Colonels Eleuterio Sanchez Rubio and José Soto, thus creating a two-tier management system of Germans that maintained a discreet distance from the actual saboteurs, who were recruited and handled by fellow supporters of the Falange. As MI5 would discover, Abt. II in Algeciras maintained a watching brief on the Rock, but the actual operations were directed by Abt. II in Madrid.
