Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  The bitter rivalry between the Abwehr and the SS, so evident in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe, had been playing out in Holland, too. But in the previous few months, Giskes had managed to establish an uneasy partnership with Joseph Schreieder, his SD counterpart in The Hague. For the time being at least, the Abwehr would cooperate with the SD, the SS’s counterespionage unit, in locating, capturing, and questioning agents sent from London.

  In his interrogation techniques, Giskes preferred using a rapier approach—quiet, intense verbal pressure—rather than the SD and Gestapo’s bludgeon, which usually involved torture. Promising Lauwers he would not be harmed, Giskes pressed the exhausted, frightened agent to agree to “play back” his wireless set—that is, to continue to send messages to London as if he were still free. At first Lauwers adamantly refused, but after many hours of interrogation, he finally gave in, confident that when he left out his security check, as he had been repeatedly told to do, SOE would realize he had been captured.

  As an SOE recruit in London, Lauwers had been under the impression that he would be working for MI6—a mistaken idea that the highly secretive SOE never corrected. Like so many others who admired MI6, he thought of it as an elite intelligence service that rarely if ever made mistakes. He and his fellow Dutch agents, Lauwers later wrote, had two things in common: “a deep love of our country and a blind trust in our superiors. The long-standing reputation of the British Secret Service throughout the world and the training which the agents received brought our trust…to the heights of almost mystical belief.”

  Secure in that conviction, he resumed his transmissions to London under Giskes’s watchful eye, expecting that when SOE realized his situation, it would break off all contact. In four successive messages, he left out his security check, but SOE gave no indication it understood his warnings. Increasingly desperate, he began inserting the letters “CAU” and “GHT” in his transmissions. Again no reaction. Many years later, Leo Marks would remark that “no agent in my experience tried harder than [Lauwers] to let us know he was caught….Poor devil, he did his damnedest.”

  In fact, Lauwer’s missing check had been noted by SOE signals operators and brought to the attention of Blizzard and his N Section subordinates. They concluded that the repeated lack of a check was insufficient evidence to prove that Lauwers was in custody. Not long afterward, they informed him that another agent would be parachuted in to join him and Taconis. When the new operative landed in late March, Giskes and his men were on hand to greet him.

  Thus began das Englandspiel (“the England Game”), an extraordinary two-year Abwehr operation that netted more than fifty London-sent Dutch agents (several of whom had been sent by MI6 and were caught up in the SOE debacle), not to mention hundreds of tons of arms and explosives. The worst disaster in SOE history, it would virtually decapitate the Dutch resistance movement.

  From March 1942 onward, a steady flood of operatives and weapons was dropped into the waiting arms of the Abwehr and Gestapo. Like Lauwers, the agents who were wireless operators agreed to “play back” their sets, believing that SOE would instantly notice their lack of a security check. And once again, the omitted checks were ignored. To a man, the newcomers’ reaction to “this continuous negligence of the grossest kind” was “stupefying bewilderment,” as Lauwers put it.

  Initially, Giskes shared their confusion. Like Lauwers, he conflated SOE with MI6, which he long had viewed as an omnipotent agency “famous for its long experience and unexcelled skill at the conduct of underground warfare.” But as das Englandspiel played out, he changed his mind. The agents, he wrote, were “amateurs, despite their training in England,” which had been sadly negligent in preparing them for “their immensely difficult task.”

  In his interrogations, Giskes convinced several agents that the reason for their immediate capture was not the result of monumental incompetence on the part of SOE but because double agents in the organization’s headquarters had betrayed them to the Germans. Shocked and demoralized by the lie and swayed by Giskes’s promise to free them at the end of the war, a number of them acquiesced when he said they might as well tell him everything they knew. Soon, Giskes, Schreieder, and their staffs had amassed a huge volume of information about N Section operations, including copious details about its officials, instructors, and training schools.

  —

  BY JUNE 1942, FIFTEEN AGENTS had been dispatched to Holland, all of them, in N Section’s deluded view, doing a fine job of organizing Dutch resistance. Much more, however, needed to be done, and to oversee that expanded effort, the next man to be parachuted into Holland was George Jambroes, a former resistance leader who had escaped to Britain in late 1941 and who had close connections with the Dutch government in exile.

  Jambroes’s mission was to take command of all resistance groups in the Netherlands and form them into an underground army of saboteurs that would begin readying itself for its role in the Allied invasion of Europe. To help him in this hugely ambitious effort, Jambroes was to be sent twenty SOE agents—ten organizers and ten radio operators. He was also to work closely with the leaders of the various resistance groups, unifying them under an umbrella organization to be called the National Committee of Resistance.

  On June 26, 1942, Jambroes was parachuted into Holland, with a wireless operator and several tons of weapons and explosives. They were met, of course, by a large German reception party, including Giskes and Schreieder. After an all-night interrogation of Jambroes, the Abwehr and SD were in full possession of the details of his mission. The information’s significance was obvious to Giskes and Schreieder and to their bosses in Berlin: if its successes continued, das Englandspiel might well produce clues to the exact timing and location of the Allied invasion of Europe.

  In the short term, however, the Germans faced a serious problem. After N Section had informed the SOE brass of Jambroes’s “successful” arrival, a message was sent to Jambroes, ordering him to get in touch with the leaders of Ordedienst (OD), the largest and best-organized of the country’s resistance organizations. The problem for the Germans, as Giskes acknowledged, was that they had no idea who Ordedienst’s leaders were or how to find them. As a result, the ongoing fictional reports of success were going to be difficult to sustain. Giskes’s solution was to send a cable to London in Jambroes’s name, advising that the top echelons of OD had been so infiltrated by German informers that it would be suicidal to seek them out. Instead, Giskes/Jambroes proposed that Jambroes make contact with lower-level members of area OD groups, whose names would obviously be unknown to either SOE or the Dutch government in exile. N Section agreed.

  In the summer and fall of 1942, SOE received a series of rosy reports from Giskes/Jambroes: the resistance groups that Jambroes had supposedly contacted were making astonishing progress in their training and now were in great need of more instructors and arms. London responded in “conveyor-belt” fashion, Giskes later wrote, dispatching twenty-seven more agents and hundreds of additional tons of equipment and supplies. By December 1942, forty-three SOE and MI6 operatives were in German custody.

  For Giskes personally, the astonishing success of das Englandspiel was not an unalloyed triumph. He was exhausted, for one thing, having spent a succession of uncomfortable nights in marshy fields, waiting for new drops of agents and arms. During those long, cold waits, he was plagued by the fear that the British had caught on to the scheme and that bombs, not agents, would fall from the sky. But no bombs fell—only more agents and more arms for the Germans to collect.

  Another downside was London’s incessant demands for action on the part of the agents. Having received all those glowing reports on the development of the Dutch underground army, SOE asked to see some proof of its progress. London’s calls for “open attacks on shipyards, ships, and locks became more and more pressing,” Giskes remembered. He and his colleagues had no option but to use all their inventiveness to convince SOE that an active sabotage campaign against German targets was indeed under way.
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  Drawing on the resources of an Abwehr sabotage team from Brussels, Giskes staged a number of dummy explosions on Dutch railway lines that caused no real damage but were widely reported in the Dutch press and much discussed by Dutch railway workers. On another occasion, a barge carrying aircraft parts was blown up in broad daylight as it approached Rotterdam harbor. Rotterdam residents who witnessed the explosion erupted in cheers, unaware that the barge was a derelict and the aircraft parts came from wrecked planes and could never have been used again.

  At one point, London ordered the destruction of several power stations and a key radio tower used by the Germans—targets that were clearly off limits even to faux sabotage. In the case of the power stations, Giskes/Jambroes explained to London that the three saboteurs assigned to destroy them had stumbled into a minefield before they could accomplish their mission. As for the radio tower, a story was planted in the Dutch press about a failed attempt to blow it up by “unknown criminal elements.” N Section accepted the failures without complaint.

  By early 1943, das Englandspiel had ballooned into such a huge scam that Giskes was forced to cut it back. “I was faced with the problem of keeping London…supplied with information about the multifarious activities of nearly 50 agents,” he wrote, “and it seemed impossible that we could keep this up for long.” His solution was to inform SOE that, regrettably, several of the agents had suffered fatal accidents or had been captured and killed by the Germans.

  —

  THOUGH N SECTION NEVER seemed to doubt Giskes’s self-described “fairy tales,” an increasing number of outsiders began expressing skepticism about the entire Dutch operation. Prince Bernhard, Queen Wilhelmina’s son-in-law, informed the British of his government’s worries that “all was not well” in the Netherlands. Several officers in SOE’s signals department noted the lack of security checks in messages from Dutch agents. One officer was so insistent in his warnings that he was told by his superiors if he mentioned the matter again, he would be drafted into the British Army for frontline service.

  Also suspicious were a number of RAF pilots who transported the Dutch agents to their drop zones. The pilots noted that they never had any problems in their flights to Holland or in making the drops. There were no German night fighters or antiaircraft guns, and the landing areas were perfectly laid out and well lighted—“too bloody perfect,” in the opinion of one flier. The difficulties would begin on the return trip home. “People seemed to get a very easy run in, and then the aircraft would disappear on the way out,” recalled an RAF squadron leader. “Not all of them, but it was a rough ride out.” In less than a year, twelve RAF bombers were shot down by German fighters lying in wait for them on their way back from Holland—much higher losses than in similar missions to France and other countries in western Europe.

  But of all the skeptics of SOE activities in Holland, none was more insistent than Leo Marks. Throughout most of 1942, he repeatedly warned Charles Blizzard and other N Section officials about the lack of their agents’ security checks, only to be rebuffed. “They had a stock answer to every enquiry I made about the security of their agents: ‘They’re perfectly all right; we have our own ways of checking on them,’ ” he recalled. “I wasn’t in a position to ask what they were.”

  Marks finally took his suspicions to Sir Charles Hambro, SOE’s director. But Hambro, too, seemed unimpressed by his evidence. When the SOE chief demanded more conclusive proof, Marks turned his attention to a study of the indecipherable messages generated by Dutch operatives over the last several months. He discovered that, amazingly, not one signal from Holland had been corrupted during that period. “Why were the Dutch agents the only ones who never made mistakes in their coding?” he asked himself. “Were their working conditions so secure that they had as much time as they needed to encode their messages and didn’t have to worry about Germans on the prowl?” To test his theory that the enemy was controlling Dutch radio traffic, he sent a message to Holland that ended with the common German sign-off “HH,” standing for “Heil Hitler.” When he received an apparently reflexive reply that also ended with “HH,” Marks knew it had come from a German. (As das Englandspiel progressed, German radio operators had begun taking over from the captive SOE agents.)

  Trying to imagine how it felt “to be in a prison cell in Holland hoping that someone in London was awake,” SOE’s chief of codes had finally had enough. In January 1943, he shut himself away for three days to study every message that had been exchanged between Holland and London. When he finished, he wrote a blistering four-page report that could have been summarized, he said, in just four words: “God help these agents.”

  In his memo, Marks noted the receipt of several messages from Holland detailing the myriad dangers and fatal mishaps that supposedly had befallen agents in the field. Yet, he went on, “despite deaths by drowning, by exploding minefields, by dropping accidents, despite every kind of difficulty, setback and frustration, not a single Dutch agent had been so overwrought that he’d made a mistake in his coding.” The question, he added, “was no longer which agents were caught but which were free.”

  When Marks showed his conclusions to Colonel Frederick Nicholls, the head of SOE’s signaling department and Marks’s immediate superior, Nicholls said that they “certainly could not be ignored” and that he would pass them on to the agency’s top officials. A few weeks later, Marks was summoned to meet with Colin Gubbins, who would be named head of SOE a few months later. Gubbins told Marks that as a result of his report, an independent investigation would be launched into the Dutch agents’ security. But while that was under way, Gubbins said, Marks was forbidden to discuss his suspicions with anybody but Nicholls or Gubbins himself.

  Agreeing to keep quiet, Marks waited for the inquiry to begin. But as the winter of 1943 turned to spring, he saw no sign of action. Marks finally concluded that Gubbins was keeping his report under wraps because he feared its incendiary contents might mean the end of the agency. Gubbins knew that SOE’s apparent achievements in Holland were considered essential for the planning of D-Day and for SOE’s credibility in Whitehall. Indeed, several months earlier, Hambro had sent a telegram to OSS director William Donovan promising that “SOE will be ready by February 1943 at the latest to mount operations into France and the Low Countries, and I am confident that [this] will mark the turning point in European resistance.” When he saw the telegram, Marks later wrote, “I did my best not to shout, ‘Doesn’t [Hambro] realize that the Low Countries’ security couldn’t be lower?’ ”

  When SOE was organized in 1940, its creators mandated that if the agency ever suspected German control of any of its networks, it was to turn over the handling of those operations to MI6. Gubbins was sure that Stewart Menzies and Claude Dansey would view such information as the perfect weapon with which to kill what they considered MI6’s greatest enemy. It was best, therefore, to keep such damning news secret for as long as possible.

  Still, there were some changes after Marks turned in his report. Charles Blizzard was removed as head of N Section, to be replaced by Seymour Bingham, a British businessman who had grown up in the Netherlands and who had worked for MI5 in London after the war began. Dismissed in mid-1941 for heavy drinking, Bingham had then been brought to SOE by Richard Laming, who had known him in Holland. For the eleven months he headed N Section, he would turn out to be as myopic and misguided as his two predecessors.

  In an even more troubling development, Marks was told that instead of canceling further drops of agents into Holland, SOE had actually decided to increase the number. From March to May 1943, another nine operatives were parachuted in, all of them picked up by Giskes’s men as soon as they landed. By May, the Dutch prison holding the agents was so overcrowded that three of them were packed into every cell.

  Before leaving London, each agent had met with Marks for the usual final briefing on codes. Those sessions were agony for Marks, who, though convinced that the operatives would soon be jumping to their doom,
was forbidden by his superiors to warn them.

  In July 1943, four months after Gubbins had promised an investigation, Colonel Nicholls finally informed Marks that one was under way and that he would be called as a witness. But he was also told that under no circumstances could he mention to the investigators his own report or his suspicions; those conducting the probe must be allowed to make up their own minds about the true state of affairs in the Netherlands. When Nicholls asked Marks if he had any questions, he replied, “Only one, sir. Is this to be a genuine inquiry or an in-house cover-up?”

  To Marks, the answer was obvious.

  —

  AS MARKS LATER POINTED OUT, SOE had become a real threat not only to its own agents in Holland but to many members of the Dutch resistance, whose “lives were needlessly thrown away.” Using information gleaned from the captured agents by Abwehr interrogators, Dutch collaborators working with the Germans were able to infiltrate many resistance groups, leading to large-scale arrests and executions.

  In March 1943, a collaborator posing as an SOE agent made contact with Koos Vorrink, a former Dutch prime minister who had become one of the country’s top resistance leaders. The collaborator told Vorrink that their country’s government in exile wanted to know the names of the members of a large underground group of prominent Dutch politicians that Vorrink had created. The ex–prime minister complied with the request; by the following afternoon, he and more than 150 other key resistance figures were in prison.

  As for the fifty-four London-sent agents who ended up in German custody, the SS did not live up to the promise it had made to Giskes to spare their lives. In September 1944, as invading Allied forces approached Holland, most of the agents were transported to the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Shortly after their arrival, they were machine-gunned in a granite quarry inside the camp. Of the original fifty-four, only four, Lauwers among them, survived.