A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Enigma, the German coding-decoding machine, posed a seemingly insoluble puzzle to the British. This version of Enigma was photographed directly from the operational manual issued by the German Army. (Other branches of the armed forces and the government used different versions of the device.) A huge variety of code wheels, called rotors, each wired differently from any other, and used in combinations of three, provided the enciphering-deciphering variable of the system. Three rotors are visible at the left rear of the machine illustrated. Not only did a letter or number entered emerge as a different unit, but also after each entry the rotors automatically turned; thus, the identical letter entered in immediate succession would not emerge as a coded duplicate. Decoding depended on precise knowledge of how the rotors were set for each specific encoding. The wire cables on the front of the machine permitted many additional changes in the circuitry and thereby provided even more individual code patterns. With so complex—yet fast and portable—a system, the Nazis quite naturally believed their Enigma communications were unbreakable.

  Outside the town of Bletchley, a rail and industrial hub in the heart of England, stands a Victorian mansion on an estate called Bletchley Park. The mansion housed replicas of the German Enigma coding-decoding machines. Nearby buildings provided operational facilities and housing for the remarkable group that gradually broke the Enigma code system. That, in company with other deciphering and analysis of radio communications, was given the highest classification—“Top-secret Ultra”—and as ULTRA the Enigma decoding is now popularly known. The Bletchley operations permitted INTREPID to give President Roosevelt secret access to Hitler’s intentions and plans.

  INTREPID’s communications required absolute security. He employed special ciphers developed by SOE and SIS. He frequently carried his highest-priority communications personally and sometimes sent them by hand of his most trusted couriers. “With a price on his head, Eric Bailey outwitted the Soviet Security Police,” wrote INTREPID of Bailey’s youthful service. In World War II, he appointed this fabled British agent, by then close to sixty, a King’s Messenger, to carry ULTRA intelligence too vital for transmission even in code. Here is Bailey in three of his many manifestations:

  a. as a Tibetan, near Lhasa, in 1904;

  b. as an Uzbek in an Asian corner of the Soviet Union, in 1920;

  c. as a Russian (seated) in Tashkent, in 1919.

  Ian Fleming, creator of the James Bond intrigues, was an aide to the chief of British Naval Intelligence. He worked closely with INTREPID and received much of his training at BSC’s secret establishment outside Toronto, in Canada, some phases from Stephenson personally. Many of the techniques and devices later portrayed in his fiction were derived, according to Fleming, from INTREPID’s operations. Here Fleming is seen in Room 40 at Royal Navy headquarters in London.

  “Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic,” President Roosevelt announced in a nationwide address on October 27, 1941. “. . . I have in my possession a secret map . . . [that] makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America, but against the United States as well.” This map was taken from a German agent and delivered to INTREPID by Ian Fleming. It showed the continent divided into five German-dominated regions. The handwritten notes concern queries about “fuel depots for overseas transports” and financial matters regarding their establishment, expansion, and supply.

  MADELEINE shortly before she was flown into Nazi territory to join the PROSPER network as a “pianist,” the slang designation for a radio-telegraphy operator. She became the sole communication link between her unit of the French underground and London after the other agents attached to PROSPER were captured.

  SOE (Special Operations Executive) was a vital branch of British intelligence entrusted with executing covert operations of an extraordinary range. Planning for these hazardous actions was intricate and had to consider every possibility from success to failure. SOE regularly produced for highly limited distribution updated maps locating, by code name only, its intelligence and resistance networks in enemy territory. This SOE map of Occupied France indicates (by superimposed arrow) PROSPER, “the biggest, busiest, and most hazardous of the networks.” It was to PROSPER that a young British agent code-named MADELEINE was assigned only a short time, as it turned out, before the network was betrayed.

  a. All British agents were volunteers. Each was thoroughly investigated, interviewed many times to determine psychological and intellectual motivation and fitness, and, if finally accepted, subjected to a rigorous course of training. Here MADELEINE is practicing “blind drops,” parachuting from a moving aircraft at night. The figure behind her is the jump master.

  b. Continuous conditioning and practice in parachute jumping and landing were possible through the use of take-offs from a stationary balloon. MADELEINE said of such drops: “It was more frightening to step cold-bloodedly into space without the comforting roar of aero-engines.”

  c. Agents were frequently given training in a specialty. MADELEINE, the first woman to be assigned as a radio-telegraphist in Occupied France, had to become fast and accurate in key transmission. Such facility was essential, but only a preliminary. Codes and their meanings had to be learned and then the operator had to demonstrate ability to work under extreme pressure. Speed and brevity were required to avoid German detection devices.

  Every contingency that might arise was brought into the training program. A working knowledge and proficiency with firearms, particularly handguns, made up an important part of the agent’s rigid schedule.

  a. Because capture was not only possible, but also a statistical certainty among so large a group of individuals thrust into unpredictable and hazardous situations, and since the Nazis’ effective use of physical and psychological torture was grimly known, all agents were supplied with an L pill. If captured, the agent could place the pill under the tongue, ready to crunch if conditions became unbearable. If a pill was swallowed unbroken, it would have no effect; if it was crushed by the teeth, certain death would follow within a matter of minutes.

  b. Special circumstances might make landing from an aircraft preferable to a parachute drop, provided the plane was almost undetectable, could land in a limited space, and could accomplish its task quickly and then disappear. To this end, so-called Moon planes were designed. They were frequently made with plywood bodies, painted a dull black, to be almost invisible against a night sky, and designed for low flight, to permit hedge-hopping and landing in small fields. Here is a Moon plane, hardly visible against a night sky.

  c. MADELEINE was sent into France by Moon plane. This aspect of an agent’s training was also a subject of practice, the goal being to allow no more than one minute for the aircraft to land, the agent to disembark, and the plane to take off from the “reception field.” An agent is here practicing scrambling from a Moon plane.

  MADELEINE’s last glimpse of England was this old farmhouse disguising one of numerous take-off points for agents.

  The methodical Gestapo took photographs of their victims before execution. Whenever possible, such pictures were copied or stolen and smuggled to Britain in the attempt to learn the fate of captured or missing agents. This photograph of a pathetic, emaciated, and defenseless agent, prior to execution, was stolen during the time when MADELEINE was a prisoner of the Gestapo, having been held continuously in hand and leg chains for many months. There is no record of a positive identification.

  Louis de Wohl, “the famous Hungarian astrologer,” visited the United States in 1941, and his predictions, foreseeing disaster for certain high-ranking Nazis, received huge press coverage and worldwide circulation. Hitler was a believer in astrology and these predictions provoked the downfall of several of his henchmen. “Mr. de Wohl” was actually a captain in the British Army, detached to work for INTREPID. His “predictions” had snippets of accuracy to bolster his credibility. His horoscopes were supplied by the staff of BSC in New York.

  Camp X contained
a subsection designated Station M, which included forgery as one of its special skills. Here is a letter so perfectly forged by matching the imperfections of typewriter keys, the inks employed, and the paper that it caused the removal of certain key pro-Nazis in South America.

  This passport gave protection to a naturalized Canadian citizen, Spiridon Mekas, who was able to travel in non-Occupied Europe and to enter Yugoslavia just before the Nazi invasion. This passport was a forgery. Its subject was a resistance leader, then hardly known, but now familiar as Tito.

  Camp X became the staging area for Heydrich’s assassination. Every available detail of his habits, daily schedule, and surroundings was studied. His regular routes were photographed, built into three-dimensional scale models, and in critical places actually constructed full size. This photograph shows the castle in Prague where he lived.

  Reinhard Tristam Eugen Heydrich, justifiably known as “the Butcher of Prague,” was Hitler’s chief executioner and master of terror. INTREPID and his advisers believed that Heydrich was quite possibly Hitler’s choice as his successor, an event that would sink the monstrosity of the Third Reich to even more horrible depths. But the proposed assassination of Heydrich raised the grim specter of Nazi retaliation. The decision to proceed was soul-searing, but it was made. The retaliation was even more atrocious than could have been predicted, but it fanned the fires of resistance to unquenchable fury.

  a. The assassins, volunteers from the Czech secret resistance army, slipped out of their occupied homeland, were flown to Camp X, and there prepared for their mission. Here is a scale model of the Prague area used in the planning and training.

  b. An agent’s photograph of the assassination scene, taken shortly after the action, shows why this hairpin bend was chosen for the attack. Heydrich’s bomb-shattered car is at the lower left.

  c. Heydrich’s car close-up after the Reich Protector’s fatally injured body had been removed.

  The operations room of a Moon plane base that secretly brought the assassins out of Czechoslovakia and, when they were ready, returned them.

  Close-up of the operations board announcing “ready” condition for dropping Heydrich’s assassins into their action area.

  By design, Bermuda became a filter point for mail between the Americas and Europe. Much German intelligence was smuggled out in innocent-looking letters like this, part of the infamous “Fred Lewis” correspondence. Intercepted at Bermuda and tested for invisible inks, the letters revealed hidden handwritten messages giving military information on the same sheets containing the innocuous typed letter. Nazi spy rings were uncovered through FBI persistence and BSC Bermuda staff’s hunches.

  German intelligence developed a new and ingenious method of using innocent-appearing mail to carry concealed messages. This was the microdot, a tiny speck of film that, by photographic reduction through a microscope, could carry a whole page of writing or drawing. Thus a comma in a typed letter might have a minute piece of film glued over it. Upon removal and enlargement, that film would produce extensive writing or graphics. An envelope, addressed to Lisbon from Mexico City, contained on its flap some small black spots that would hardly warrant attention at all.

  Microdots were discovered among those black spots. Upon enlargement, they were found to disclose military secrets. Thus the work of the Bermuda station of BSC again proved invaluable.

  The woman code-named CYNTHIA was an American, the daughter of a U.S. Marine Corps major. She first served as a British agent in Poland during the search for the secrets of the Enigma coding machine. Courageous, daring, and ingenious, CYNTHIA exploited her beauty and undeniable sexual attraction with breath-taking success.

  Vichy French diplomatic ciphers, obtained by CYNTHIA in an adventure that would seem incredible in a novel of intrigue, helped develop ULTRA solutions to Enigma codes.

  Among the sensitive and vital intelligence secured by CYNTHIA was the decoded telegram from Vichy requesting its Washington embassy to transmit for German intelligence information on British warships undergoing repairs in U.S. ports.

  No operation conducted by INTREPID during the war was more crucial than his efforts to impede the Nazi pursuit of an atomic explosive and his strategy to aid the Anglo-American development of one. One of the most dramatic incidents in his career came about through his plan to free the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr from German custody. After his escape, Bohr became a vital member of the Manhattan Project, the supersecret Allied operation that did produce an atom bomb and thus opened a new era in weaponry. Microdot messages concealed in the keys shown here instructed Bohr on the details of his escape.

  William Stephenson, the man called INTREPID, never sought public attention during his busy and productive life. He was rarely photographed. Once he accepted his role as Churchill’s secret envoy and chief of what was to become the largest intelligence operation in history, he assumed the highest degree of anonymity. He is seen here at his New York home in 1954. Behind him stands the United Nations, a most appropriate background, for without him and those of his dedication and integrity the United Nations would not stand at all.

  All photographs, except those of William Stephenson, the Enigma machine, and the mansion at Bletchley Park, are from the BSC Papers, Station M Archives.

  During one session, he grabbed a bottle, broke the neck, jabbed it into the face of an SS guard, and jumped from the second-floor window. He was running for the Bois de Boulogne when he was brought down by a hail of bullets. But his early training had paid off in one other respect: he had cut the jugular of the guard and killed him. Pickersgill was given the best German hospital treatment for his serious bullet wounds, was invited again to co-operate, again refused, and was finally tagged for Nacht und Nebel—Rueckkehr Unerwuenscht (Night and Fog—Return Not Required).

  MADELEINE herself made another attempt to escape, together with two other agents held in Avenue Foch. They succeeded in breaking out of the top of the old building and jumping to flat roofs below in the dead of night. Their plans had been carefully prepared, but security was too much for them. This time, when the girl was marched back, SS Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer* telegraphed Berlin that she was a desperado, and he could not remain responsible for her safe custody. She was dispatched to the Black Forest prison of Pforzheim.

  Her requiem did not appear until four years after the end of the war. Even then, it broke the tradition that British secret operations remain a closed book. MADELEINE was one of the exceptions made when parts of a story become public and may lead to false conclusions. On April 5, 1949, the long silence was ended by this notice that she had been awarded the highest honor the British could pay—the George Cross:

  CHANCERY OF THE ORDERS OF KNIGHTHOOD

  Following her arrival the Gestapo made mass arrests in the Paris Resistance groups to which she had been detailed. She refused to abandon what had become the principal and most dangerous post in France, although given the opportunity to return to England. She did not wish to leave her French comrades without communications and she hoped also to rebuild her group.

  The Gestapo had a full description of her but knew only her code name MADELEINE. They deployed considerable forces in their effort to catch her and so break the last remaining link with London. After 3½ months she was betrayed to the Gestapo and taken to their HQ in the Avenue Foch. The Gestapo had found her codes and messages and were in a position to work back to London. They asked her to co-operate, but she refused and gave them no information of any kind. . . .

  The citation described her as the first Baker Street agent to be sent by the Nazis to a German camp. There she was labeled “particularly dangerous” and handcuffed and chained day and night in a crouching position so that she depended upon male jailers to deal with her sanitary and feeding problems. In this manner, chained like a vicious animal in total isolation, she was held for ten months. Despite this, she still refused to give any information about her work or her colleagues.

  “She was taken with three othe
rs to Dachau Camp on the 12th September, 1944,” concluded the notice outside St. James’s Palace. “On arrival, she was taken to the crematorium and shot.”

  “At least 24,000 members of the French secret army were executed. Of 115,000 deported to death camps, some 40,000 returned in various stages of emaciation,” Stephenson reported later. Of those who fought pitched battles with the enemy, another 30,000 were killed. These appalling losses were suffered in darkness, to become known only after the war. The diaries of Pickersgill helped his brother Jack, a Canadian cabinet minister, reconstruct that whole tragedy. The girls who became agents were many, ranging from HANNA, who parachuted into Tito’s zone to bring out fellow Jewish survivors, to ODETTE, the young mother who left her children in Kensington to wind up in a Gestapo torture chamber. “The dimensions of the coming ordeal for such girls were dimly perceived in early 1941,” Stephenson said. “President Roosevelt’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ did more than give heart to those like Madeleine who defied the torturers until death brought welcome oblivion. In judging his deep involvement and personal risks, you must consider these individual acts of courage, which matched his own. Because he knew of these lonely acts of heroism, he felt he could do no less.”