The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  The Allied intelligence mosaic became ever more dominated by Enigma and Tunny decrypts. For British and American generals in the later stages of the war Ultra became an addictive drug, requiring a twice- or thrice-daily ‘fix’ before any operational decision was taken. In camouflaged trucks and tents high on windswept Italian mountains or deep in muddy French fields, bespectacled young staff officers in British battledress or US Army combat fatigues huddled over the latest signals from Bletchley. The Allied high command faced a constant dilemma about how much Ultra material to disclose to those who must fight the Germans at the sharp end. If it was claimed that a given piece of intelligence came from agent reports or – less convincing still – from line-crossers, nobody much credited it. But if they knew that it bore the authority of the enemy’s own words, they could hardly fail to do so.

  Bill Williams, Montgomery’s intelligence chief, said that officers who had been indoctrinated about codebreaking became pathologically discreet: ‘What an agent says becomes gossip. To explain the nature of Ultra was to slam the door on this approach … The vast number of its recipients were so frightened of losing what … was obviously an immense strategic asset that we got away without its loss.’ The US Army in Italy had a half-solemn, half-mocking phrase for its Ultra-indoctrinated officers, who were said to be ‘steeped in the blood of the lamb’. Ultra product was known as ‘Black Market’. Rumour among headquarters officers not privy to the secret suggested that it was a channel through which Allied commanders conducted arguments or issued reprimands unfit for the eyes of junior personnel.

  Knowledge of the wizardry of Bletchley was restricted to intelligence officers at army level and above. No one who might fall into enemy hands should be capable of betraying its story; thus, past service at the Park formed a permanent bar to a combat role, even if a few men aspired to one – Keith Batey alone achieved it. Corps and divisional commanders who were not Ultra-indoctrinated were simply informed of a clear distinction between what Army HQ stated as fact about German deployments or intentions, and what it merely suspected. Much lighter security attended the activities of the Y Service – eavesdroppers on enemy voice traffic – because the Germans were obviously aware of its existence, and themselves played the same game. ‘Y’ often provided a cloak for intelligence secured through decrypts. Bill Williams believed that even the highest commanders should merely receive briefs based on sigint, rather than being allowed to see decrypts as they came in: ‘No senior officer should ever read naked Ultra unless he is trained in Intelligence … They are given a weapon often too big for their hand.’ In the view of Britain’s chiefs of staff this applied especially to their prime minister, who often used a decrypted report from an enemy commander as a club with which to belabour his own generals about their alleged pusillanimity.

  Special operations and Resistance contributed something, though less than romantics wish to believe, to eventual Allied triumph in Normandy. In the first days after the Allied landings, parties of the British Special Air Service, together with SOE and OSS teams, were dropped all over France to foment trouble for the Germans by any means to hand. On 10 June a party of local Resistance fighters visited the camp of a British Special Air Service group in the forest of Verrières in the Vienne, bearing important news. The SAS, fifty strong, had been parachuted into France on 7 June for an operation codenamed ‘Bulbasket’, intended to promote sabotage attacks far behind the German front in collaboration with Resisters. Now the visitors urged the English to address an important rail junction at Châtellerault some thirty-five miles northwards, where German petrol stocks were being held. The SAS team’s commanding officer, Captain John Tonkin, deputed Lt. Twm Stephens to accompany two Frenchmen on a cycle ride to reconnoitre the junction. Stephens, a mustachioed little Welshman who looked plausibly French, donned an ill-fitting civilian suit and beret and set forth on what was a highly dangerous journey – in the wake of D-Day the region teemed with alert and fearful Germans. He and his companions nonetheless reached Châtellerault, where the British officer found that the locals had not exaggerated. In the marshalling yards stood line upon line of tanker wagons, enveloped in heavy camouflage netting, and thus far unscathed by Allied air attack.

  Stephens and the others rode back to the camp at Verrières, which they reached the following night, after an absence of thirty-six hours. Tonkin’s wireless-operator signalled to the SAS Brigade’s British base the map reference of eleven petrol trains halted in sidings a thousand yards east of the junction. An Ultra intercept the same day showed that the Germans intended the fuel for the Das Reich 2nd SS Armoured Division, incongruously designated in the British decrypt ‘2 Sugar Sugar Panzer’, which was en route to Normandy. Within three hours, twenty-four twin-engined Mosquitoes of the RAF’s 487, 646 and 107 squadrons strafed and bombed the junction, destroying the trains and their precious fuel. 2nd SS Panzer reached Normandy in the end, but its arrival on the battlefield was significantly delayed by the air attack, prompted by the SAS’s signal from France.

  Here was a textbook example of coordination between intelligence, special forces, Resistance and air power to achieve an outcome which – as Ultra revealed – materially assisted the Allied battle for Normandy. Few such operations ended as successfully as Lt. Stephens’s reconnaissance – for which he paid with his life when he and most of his comrades were captured and executed following a German assault on their forest base a few days after the bicycle ride to Châtellerault. But the summer of 1944 witnessed a dramatic and bloody fulfilment of Churchill’s vision for Resistance and special forces back in July 1940, when he enthused about setting Europe ablaze.

  In the first three weeks of July, Bletchley broke remarkably few army messages – the Wehrmacht’s Enigma key was going through one of its intractable periods – and the Allies were obliged merely to fight and die as best they could, with no significant Ultra assistance. In any event, this would have been unlikely to provide details of practical value about enemy deployments to meet the British assaults on Caen, which caused them much grief and successive failures before achieving belated success. For Bletchley, much the most important moment of the Normandy campaign came on the evening of 6 August, when a broken signal – once more from Luftwaffe traffic – revealed the German intention to strike in force westwards, with almost all their remaining panzers, towards the sea at Avranches. Thus forewarned, an overwhelming concentration of Allied air power and artillery, together with a gallant stand by the US 30th Division, wrecked the so-called Mortain counterattack.

  Ultra also flagged Hitler’s determination to persevere with this assault, even as American troops burst out of their perimeter and surged south and east, bypassing the struggling panzers. Allied forces could advance to close the ‘Falaise Gap’, knowing that much of the Germans’ surviving strength was trapped to the west of it, still battering vainly at the American holding force between themselves and Avranches. This represented Ultra’s last intervention in the north-west Europe campaign which significantly influenced battlefield events, as distinct from merely keeping Allied commanders informed of their enemies’ condition. Stuart Milner-Barry of Hut 6 never forgot breaking ‘the desperate message from the German commander in Normandy, which heralded the collapse of the German resistance … This kind of message, shown to us maybe in the middle of the night, gave one an extraordinary sensation of living with history.’

  Since 1939 the codebreakers had been told pathetically little about the impact of their herculean labours upon the course of the war. Only in the final months, with the tide running irresistibly in favour of the Allies, did field commanders belatedly recognise that morale at Bletchley might be boosted by a little feedback. Montgomery’s intelligence staff began to dispatch daily briefs from 21st Army Group headquarters. ‘One felt one was talking to friends,’ wrote Bill Williams, ‘and from that feeling of gratitude which we hoped was reflected in the words sent to the Park emerged a belief that because of them [we] were getting a better service.’

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sp; Only a few score British and American officers in the field knew how great was the armies’ debt to GC&CS. The codebreakers did not provide Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen with a key to victory; only hard fighting could achieve that. But they waved a magic wand which swept aside the shroud of secrecy behind which the enemy moved and had his being. This was a boon never before conferred on any nation at war in history. It was no fault of BP’s that generals on the battlefield sometimes ignored, misinterpreted or failed to take advantage of its bounty – as they did in north-west Europe in the closing months of the war.

  2 SUICIDE SPIES

  The most ruthless and cynical operations run by all intelligence services were those involving short-range spies – locally recruited civilians dispatched to report what they could see behind the enemy’s front line. Their prospects of success or even survival were slight, but this did not deter either the Axis or the Allies from thrusting a small army of them into the fray. In the months before D-Day, the Germans recruited three hundred French ‘stay-behind’ agents for deployment when the Allies had gained a beachhead. They were trained at the Abwehr’s spy school at Angers on the Loire, run by a fifty-three-year-old languages professor from Hamm, Hauptmann Clören, a Nazi Party member with a Swiss wife. His students, he told Allied interrogators later, were ‘of a very poor standard … unemployed men who accepted the work “for the sake of earning some money”’.

  The habitual gloom of one of Clören’s pupils, dark, bespectacled twenty-three-year-old ‘Bardou’, may have been explained by his day job as assistant to Rouen’s municipal undertaker. The Germans paid him 3,000 francs a month, and got nothing for their money. ‘Beccassino’, a young Norman, was wanted by Saint-Malo police for theft, and proved so conspicuously incompetent as an agent that the Abwehr employed him as its station cook in Angers to justify his 2,000 francs a month. After D-Day he was dispatched through the Allied lines and never heard from again. The same silence descended upon ‘Berthelot’, a former Paris art student given 20,000 francs to report from American-occupied Cherbourg. ‘Beru’, another young Parisian, allegedly sent some useful messages from Allied territory before announcing in August that he was ill, and being allowed to go home.

  After the Allied landings thirty-five-year-old Bigault de Casanove – ‘Calvert’ – was left in western France, from which he sent two wireless messages in October. The first said that 250 Resistance men planned to attack the German garrison of Saint-Nazaire. The second read: ‘I have no money left and need new orders. Please send money and orders.’ Most of the agents committed in the summer of 1944 were paid 500–800 francs a month and issued with half a dozen carrier pigeons and a supply of feed. In advance of D-Day the Abwehr kept a hundred birds at its Angers station, which were trucked out into the countryside once a month to practise flying home. A German intelligence officer told Allied interrogators sourly: ‘No messages were ever received from agents with pigeons.’

  Other Abwehr stay-behinds included twenty-three-year-old Parisian Geneviève Mouquet, ‘Girot’, an idealist who professed to believe that Vichy and the Nazis represented a ‘New Europe’. Far from being the glamorous woman spy of fiction, she was decidedly stout, but after training as a wireless-operator, in June 1944 she was sent to American-occupied Saint-Lô. Several times she returned to her base at Angers, saying that Allied bombing made it too difficult to get across the Vire to her objective. She was instead deployed to the estate of a racehorse trainer named Devoy, west of Villedieu in Normandy, who had ingratiated himself with the Germans by keeping pigeons for them during the Occupation. Mouquet lasted a month with him before fleeing east, having abandoned her wireless, saying that the place had become too dangerous. The Germans eventually allowed her to decamp to Württemberg, recording in her file that she was ‘unfit for any further intelligence work’. She had backed losers, and by August 1944 must have known it.

  The Allies fared no better than the Axis in recruiting stay-behinds. In the worst days of the Ardennes battle in December 1944, the Americans became sufficiently alarmed that they made their own frantic efforts to identify some local agents in Belgium, in case the panzers thrust onwards beyond the Meuse. A US Ninth Army officer reported gloomily: ‘The problem is not a simple one; radio-operators, at once willing and able, must be discreetly concealed in places where they have some chance of remaining even if the enemy moves in and evacuates most of the populace and searches the houses. The neighbors cannot be let in on the secret. The agent must be kept in a reasonably good frame of mind during a dull and nervous waiting period.’ It was fortunate the Bulge stay-behinds were never needed.

  In those days the Germans launched a new surge of their own line-crossers. Among enemy agents detained by the US Ninth Army during the Bulge battle were Bernard Piolot, who was allegedly caught cutting an American field telephone line; Betsy Coenegrachts, née Stratemans, of Vroenhoven, Belgium, ‘a proven smuggler and informant of the Gestapo who was responsible for the arrest of two Belgian underground espionage agents during the occupation’; Philip Staab, who allegedly admitted having worked for the Gestapo; Joseph Bernard, of Kerkrade, Holland, who confessed to being an SD agent. In all in January 1945 Ninth Army – whose G-2 records alone survive – arrested 156 people suspected of being enemy agents, of whom twenty-one were soldiers in civilian clothes, a further eleven were handed over to the Belgian authorities, twenty-eight were detained, fifty-six held for further interrogation and just twelve released. It is no more possible to guess whether such people were guilty or innocent, given the hysteria of those days, than it is to discover their eventual fate.

  As the Wehrmacht retreated, in the last months of the war hundreds of line-crossers recruited by the Allies were thrust forward into Germany. Almost all vanished, and were presumed dead. One day in March 1945, for instance, an SOE officer herded a batch of Poles up a road towards the German lines, with orders to push forward as far as they could in pursuit of information. He wrote after watching one man go: ‘I cannot say I was altogether hopeful about his chances.’ The other Poles displayed last-minute reluctance, but eventually disappeared towards Osnabrück, ‘three rather forlorn-looking figures disappearing into the blue’. Nothing is known of their later stories.

  The Americans enlisted the services of the Belgian Sûreté to identify local men willing to risk their lives by plunging into the maelstrom of a collapsing Reich. A report on an operation launched on 1 March 1945 by an OSS officer named Josendale described a farcical attempt to parachute agent ‘Peter’ behind the German front. During the flight to the dropping zone ‘the operation was brought to an unfortunate end when the agent shot himself in the leg … Had this incident not occurred, the mission would have failed in any event as the plane was recalled, due to quite heavy enemy action on the ground and in the air in the vicinity of the proposed pinpoint drop.’ Other such operations fared no better: ‘Agent “Bert” became difficult to manage and developed into a troublemaker … Agents “George” and “Hank” lost their value as the area with which they were familiar and in which they were due to operate was overrun.’ ‘Hans returned on 23 March after swimming across the Rhine, but Joseph was captured and his fate is a foregone conclusion. On the night of 23 March missions “Peter” and “Mac” were mounted. This was an airdrop operation. Agent “Peter” refused to go through with the mission at the last moment and agent “Fred” was substituted in his place. For security reasons agent “Peter” has been placed in custody for the duration of the war. Agent “Fred” was dropped in the Hamm area and one testing W/T contact was made with him on 24 March, since then no contact has been established with him.’

  Soviet line-crossers suffered equally devastating attrition. In July 1944 Stalin decreed the creation of networks up to three hundred miles beyond the front, in German, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech and Polish territory, for the promotion of sabotage and intelligence-gathering, with the same purposes for which SOE and OSS dropped hundreds of agents into France after D-Day. An officer named Nikolsky,
who ran such Soviet groups from Brest and Kobrin, frankly admitted their failure: ‘We learned even before the end of the war that almost all of our intelligence and sabotage groups had been eliminated by the enemy soon after they landed.’ An Abwehr officer in Norway, Hauptmann Pardon, picked up one GRU team and thereafter persuaded its controllers in Murmansk to parachute several supply drops into German hands.

  Few GRU agents even spoke a local language, and most were dropped blind. Every German within miles closed in on the site of a reported parachute landing, to begin a ‘Hasenjagdt’ – a hare hunt – which was usually successful. Nikolsky reported that only a dozen of 120 trained intelligence officers that he himself dispatched survived, ‘by a miracle’, until they were overrun by the Red Army. One of those who perished was a veteran of underground operations in German-occupied territory named Anna Morozova. A trained wireless-operator, she was eventually trapped and wounded on 11 November 1944 while serving with a Polish partisan group in East Prussia, and blew herself up with one of her own grenades.