but didn’t know where or when it would happen.
The Magic Gang built 2000 fake tanks from painted canvas and wood, while one thousand real British tanks
were somewhere else, disguised as trucks. The Magic
Gang also built a false railway line, which the Germans
thought was to transport troops. German pilots also
saw the British busily building a (fake) water pipe, as
if to supply the troops along the way. From what they
could see, the German commanders were certain the
British wouldn’t be able to attack before November.
They were wrong. The British attacked in late October
and from an unexpected direction. Thousands of
German soldiers died and the German campaign in
Africa was wrecked. Jasper Maskelyne helped to change
the course of World War II.
Jasper Maskelyne told his story in a book called
Magic: Top Secret, but after the war there was no longer work for a stage magician. He died years later in Kenya.
CRACKING THE CODE: ENIGMA
Spies send messages in code so the enemy can’t read
them. Cracking codes was a key part of the war effort
47
for the British and their allies. During World War II,
Britain employed many people as cryptographers.
They worked at a place called Bletchley Park, trying
to translate German messages. Huge computers,
called Colossus, were built to help. One of their great
achievements was the cracking of Enigma.
Image rights unavailable
The Enigma machine looked like a typewriter
with some add-ons and worked like a basic computer,
turning messages into code or translating codes back
into readable messages. The German Navy had used
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it for its secret communications since 1925. By the
time World War II began in 1939, the British knew the
machine existed. The trouble was, they didn’t have the
codebooks and manuals they needed to understand
how it actually worked. It wasn’t just a matter of
finding out what a single message said, because next
time the machine would have been re-set to a new
code. The same combination of letters in the next
message might mean something completely different.
In 1940, the British had a stroke of luck. Their
ship, Griffin, captured some papers from a German navy ship disguised as a fishing trawler. The German
crew threw two bags of papers overboard and Griffin’s gunner dived overboard to get them. He managed to
grab one, while the other sank.
The documents in the bag had a few days’ worth
of useful information in them, enabling the Bletchley
cryptographers to read German messages for those
days. It wasn’t enough, though. The cryptographers
had to know how the Germans changed their settings.
The Germans made one mistake: they used real
fishing trawlers to deliver weather reports to their
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navy. The navy then replied using Enigma. That meant the trawlers had to have Enigma machines – and
codebooks – on board, so they could translate the
navy’s messages.
In June 1941, the British destroyer HMS Tartar
found a German weather ship north of Iceland.
Tartar’s gun crew fired – but carefully avoided hitting the target. The German crew abandoned ship, leaving
the British free to board. The British didn’t bother
taking the Enigma machine, but they did make off with
their papers. A Naval Intelligence officer, Allon Bacon, sorted through the papers and finally found what he
wanted: a diagram with instructions for changing
settings inside the Enigma machine. The puzzle was
closer to being solved. Later, codebooks were taken
from a German submarine, and cryptographers could
set to work cracking codes.
After the war, the British government destroyed the
Colossus, to keep the work done at Bletchley Park secret.
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6
COOL CATS
AND COLD WAR
DISASTERS
Imagine people chatting at a cocktail party at a
government embassy. A glossy cat is slinking around
people’s legs as they drink and talk. Nobody takes
much notice of him, but that cruising cat is more than
he seems . . .
In the 1960s, someone in the CIA had the idea of
a cat ‘spy’. Operation Acoustic Kitty was a
plan to wire a cat for sound. They would
implant a microphone into a cat and an
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antenna in his tail, and then train him to obey orders.
It was a costly project and a big mistake. Anyone
who has ever owned a cat knows it won’t do anything it doesn’t want to do. When the cat got hungry, he went
for a snack. If a female cat wandered past, he went
after her. Then, when the CIA sent him off to spy on
people in the park, poor
Acoustic Kitty was
knocked over by
a car on his first
day. A CIA agent
rushed over to get back the
equipment from his insides.
This is only one of the
crazy ideas dreamed up by spy
agencies during the 1950s and 1960s – a period known
as the Cold War. Up until a few years ago, the CIA’s files from this time were top secret – no one was allowed to
see them. Now the files are open and they tell us some
interesting things.
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SO, WHAT WAS THE COLD WAR?
During World War II, the United States and the USSR
(now the Commonwealth of Independent States,
including Russia) fought together to defeat Nazi
Germany. But the Americans and the Russians were
never on friendly terms. The USSR was communist
and the Americans thought communism was
anti-democratic and dangerous. Afterwards, both
countries spied on each other and stockpiled weapons
in case the other side attacked. This armed truce was
known as the Cold War because no shots were actually
fired. The most famous modern spy stories happened
during this time.
The race to get into space was a part of this ‘war’.
The USSR got there first, in 1957,
with a satellite called Sputnik.
Much later, both sides sent up
satellites to spy on each
other from space.
53
THE OLD EXPLODING CIGAR TRICK
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA was trying
to defend democracy from any communist threat.
Fidel Castro was president of the communist country
of Cuba, which is right on the United States’ doorstep.
The CIA wanted to get rid of Castro.
Castro was famous for his bushy beard and his
fondness for cigars. Both were used against him.
There was a silly plan to make a powder that would
cause his beard to fall out. And another plan was to
send him an exploding cigar. We don’t know if the CIA
got these anywhere near him, but Castro didn’t lose
his beard. The next bright idea was to pump a drug
into a studio where Castro was to give
an interview, making him appear
si
lly. That didn’t work either.
The ‘Make Castro Look a Fool’
project was a flop.
54
The CIA got
serious then, with
a plan to kill him.
Castro loved scuba
diving, so someone
thought, ‘Aha!
Let’s give him a
poisoned wetsuit!’
But the American
diplomat who was supposed to deliver it wisely decided
his country couldn’t afford the trouble it would cause.
He handed over a clean wetsuit instead.
So the CIA didn’t succeed in killing or embarrassing
Fidel Castro.
SPOOKY IDEAS
The USSR was Enemy Number 1 as far as the CIA was
concerned. The agency tried to use Californian psychics
to tell them what was going on there. Why send spies
into danger when mind-readers could close their eyes
and ‘watch’ another country without leaving home?
55
Well, in the test run, the psychic who was asked to ‘see’
a particular place in Russia got the details wrong.
The CIA did another test on its own employees,
to see if drugs would help in questioning captured
enemies. But the drug could make people hallucinate,
and one poor CIA worker jumped out of a window.
THE CAMBRIDGE DOUBLE AGENTS
The Cold War was a scary time, whether you lived in
the USSR or in America or Britain. Both sides were
stockpiling weapons and
making atom bombs, and
war was a real possibility.
People believed spies
were everywhere, and
there was a lot of
spying going on.
56
In Britain the ‘Cambridge
spies’ were recruited at
England’s Cambridge
University in the 1930s.
These men were double
agents, spying for the
USSR while working
for British Intelligence.
In fact, one of them, Kim
Philby, was high up in Britain’s
MI6 agency, in charge of spying on Soviet spies when
he was giving information about Britain and the US to
Russia. Kim Philby escaped to Russia in the 1950s.
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF:
THE ROSENBERGS
There was such a fear of communism in America in the
1950s that sometimes innocent people were accused of
spying. Among these were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
a married couple who were charged with having sold
secrets before the Cold War began. They would not
57
admit to spying for the USSR, even though they had
two young children and a confession might have saved
their lives.
Julius and Ethel claimed to be innocent, but they
were sent to the electric chair in 1953.
People accused of working for the USSR couldn’t
just confess, they had to accuse someone else if they
wanted to receive a lighter sentence. Ethel Rosenberg’s
brother, David Greenglass, was a soldier. When he
was charged with giving nuclear secrets to the USSR,
he said Ethel and her husband had been involved.
Julius Rosenberg insisted he knew nothing about it.
He had been a Communist before the war, but it wasn’t
illegal then.
Some Russian files have been translated that
suggested that Julius, at least, might have been spying
for the USSR at one time, but had probably not
committed the crime for which he was executed.
Ethel was accused in order to force Julius to pass on
more names of communist spies.
Later, David Greenglass admitted he had accused
his sister to save his own wife and himself.
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DON’T TRUST ANYONE . . .
After World War II, Germany was divided. West Germany
was a democracy and East Germany was communist.
In East Germany, many ordinary people were
encouraged to spy on their family and neighbours,
reporting any ‘suspicious’ behaviour to the Stasi, the
secret police. The Stasi kept secret records on a huge
number of people. In the two years before Germany
was finally reunited in 1991, the Stasi shredded these
records to remove the evidence of who had been
spying. There were 16 000 sacks (180 kilometres)
of shredded paper! Now 250 have been
reconstructed – by hand!
Computer technology
might help finish off the
job, which otherwise will
take 400 years!
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7
BEST-SELLING
SPIES
Many writers of spy stories had experience as spies
or intelligence officers. One of the first spy thrillers, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), was written by an
intelligence officer, John Buchan. Graham Greene,
author of many exciting novels, including The Quiet
American, was working for British Intelligence in the Cold War era. Most famous of all was writer
Ian Fleming, the creator of the daring agent 007,
James Bond. Ian Fleming worked for British Naval
Intelligence during World War II.
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THE SPY WHO DIED AT DINNER
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was a playwright
who lived in London at the same time as William
Shakespeare. Marlowe was almost certainly a spy
working for Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Queen
Elizabeth I.
The queen had a lot of enemies. Some of her own
people thought her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots,
should be queen. Elizabeth needed clever spies to
protect her position as queen.
When Francis Walsingham died there were things
certain people didn’t want the new spymaster to know
and were afraid Christopher Marlowe might reveal.
Marlowe’s spying
came to an end when
he was stabbed in the
eye in a pub brawl.
His killer, Ingram
Frizer, claimed
they had argued over
the bill. More likely
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he killed Marlowe to keep him quiet. Ingram Frizer
pleaded self-defence and only spent 28 days in
prison for the murder.
Maybe Christopher
Marlowe
should
have stuck
to writing drama.
CODENAME ASTREA
Someone who was definitely sorry she hadn’t stuck to
writing drama was Aphra Behn. Aphra had a romance
with a man called William Scot. They called themselves
Astrea and Celedon, after the main characters of a
popular novel called L’Astree. These later came in handy as spy codenames.
Aphra married a Dutch merchant called Behn
in 1664, but he died the next year, the year England
went to war with the Dutch. By this time, William
Scot, Aphra’s old love, was living in Holland. He had
given the British government important information
62
about the Dutch, but he had killed two British agents.
The British Government thought he might be working
for the enemy as well.
In 1666, Aphra was sent to Holland to contac
t
William Scot and offer him a royal pardon if he agreed
to come back to the English side. William agreed.
He told her that the Dutch were planning a raid on
London, up the Thames River. At great risk to her own
life, Aphra smuggled the information to England, but
the British government didn’t act on it and the Dutch
raid went ahead. Aphra was furious. Even worse, she
was stuck in Holland until 1667, and she had to borrow
money to get home because her spymaster hadn’t given
her any money for expenses. Then she was jailed in London for being unable to pay debts!
63
Eventually, the government paid off her debts, but
that was the end of Aphra Behn’s spy career. She spent
the rest of her life as a best-selling writer instead.
Some of her books are still in print and her plays are
still being performed.
THE FATHER OF THE
BRITISH SECRET SERVICE
Daniel Defoe took up spying because he was broke.
He had spent all his money in 1685 supporting a
rebellion by the Duke of Monmouth against the king,
and he was lucky not to be executed when the rebellion
failed. Daniel became a journalist and wrote an article
mocking the government . . . and he was put into jail.
After his release, he wrote to a powerful politician with a proposal for a Secret Service. Daniel would run it and teams of spies would travel around England reporting
anyone who might be a danger to the government. The
idea was a success, and Daniel travelled England posing
as a merchant called Alexander Goldsmith.
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Daniel was also the editor of a
Scottish newspaper while he was
working for the English government.
Through his writing he managed to
undermine a movement to get the
Scottish royal family back into power
in England.
By 1720, Daniel was
writing popular stories and
making a good living, so he
quit his spy job. He wrote his famous story Robinson Crusoe at this time. But he was too much of a miser to pay off his debts, and spent the rest of his life
on the run from people to whom he owed money.
Nobody came to his funeral.
POPOV THE SPY
‘So, what can you tell
me about Popov?’
asked the British Naval
It's True! Your Cat Could Be a Spy Page 4
