by Nigel West
(a) Portuguese Consulates in the UK
(b) Swiss Consulates
(c) a source who is believed by the Germans to report to Stockholm by some means which does not take more than twenty-four hours to transit.
All the reports received by the Germans through these channels have contained information of extremely poor quality and in some cases have been ludicrously mistaken. It is believed that in fact the reports are manufactured at some point before their receipt in Berlin and there is no evidence to show that any communications of this sort are despatched from this country.
D SABOTAGE.
As a result of British protests to the Spanish Government about German and Italian sabotage activities in and around Gibraltar, the Spaniards have arrested a number of German agents in Southern Spain. Some of these are genuinely working for the Germans, others are double-crossing the Germans and working for us, while one, though pretending to be double-crossing the Germans and working for the Security Service, is known really to be still working for the Germans. It is believed that the arrest of these agents is not much more than a gesture and the conditions of their indiscretion are such that the German Secret Service in Madrid is communicating with some of the agents who are in prison, while others are regularly reporting to us at Gibraltar. Friedrich Baumann, the German sabotage expert in Madrid, writes in secret ink to one German agent in prison, the letters being taken by a trusted courier. This courier is in fact working for us and a recent letter from Baumann was flown to England where the secret ink message was temporarily developed by special processes, photographed and allowed to sink back into this paper and become invisible, (see attached photostat). The letter was flown back to Gibraltar and has been delivered to the German Agent in the Spanish prison. It is evident that imprisonment does not prevent this German agent from having the necessary chemicals to develop his master’s secret writing.
These mass arrests have interfered with our double-cross organisation in so far as we now have no one to ‘commit’ sabotage for the Germans. This lack however is also felt by the Germans, who have instructed one of our agents to recruit some more saboteurs. They are only going to commit imaginary sabotage for the Germans, though it may be necessary to commit faked sabotage for them.
The German Secret Service officer who escaped from Germany is now being used for secret broadcasts in German. He speaks as a German officer without giving his real name. There has recently been a very satisfactory round up of a German spy agency in Persia.
E Germans willing to collaborate with the British.
It is now proposed to use the German officer who was mentioned in Report No. 5 to speak in the secret broadcasts in German to Germany. He will operate as a German officer, but without giving his real name. He may also have other uses in the future.
F SABOTAGE and SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES in PERSIA and IRAQ.
In recent months the Germans have increased their efforts to establish agents in the Middle East, and more particularly in Persia and Iraq. Seeing their chance of invading the area becoming more and more remote, the Germans seem now to be turning their attention to sabotaging our lines of communication and supply. They also aim, by incitement of local tribes to open revolt, to tie down Allied troops in the area.
In June a party of four – three Germans and an Iraqi – were dropped by parachute in the Mosul area of Iraq and, after a few days at large, were arrested. This party was primarily concerned with encouraging Kurdish insurrection but, after establishing itself, it was to signal Berlin by wireless for a further party who were to land with sabotage equipment. The original party is now supplying us with a considerable amount of new and useful information on German sabotage methods and training.
It has been known for some considerable time that German agents were at large in Persia. Left behind when Russia and ourselves invaded Persia in 1941 they have remained in hiding, helped by high-ranking Persian officials and by officers and by tribal chieftains of Axis sentiment.
Most prominent among these agents was Franz Mayr whom we captured in August. His aim was to influence Persian polities, and so thwart British policy and assist the expected German attack through the Caucasus by subversive activity.
Until March this year Mayr had been occasionally in touch with the German Embassy in Ankara by courier – a Teheran merchant who engaged in smuggling activities across the Turko-Persian frontier. Mayr’s primary need was for money and for an operator to work his wireless set – one of five handed over to him by the Japanese Legation when they left plain code messages in the form of greetings programmes broadcast from Germany which told him that help was on its way. This came at the end of March when a party of six German agents were dropped by parachute south of Teheran. They contacted Mayr and, until they were all arrested in August, they were in wireless communication with Germany. Although they were prepared for sabotage Mayr dissuaded them, as he considered his political activities would be endangered.
A later party of German agents is known to have been dropped in Persia by parachute in July, and there is reason to believe that others may have followed. For the moment these further expeditions are still at large.
* * *
This sixth report is quite unusual in the whole series because part of an earlier draft has been left in the original MI5 file, and a comparison between the two makes interesting reading, and shows that in the editing process a few items were omitted from the final version. The original draft reads:
Several more spies have been arrested during the period under report. These include an Italian who had been working for the Italian and German consulates at Lourenço Marques; a German who was landed from a German submarine near Quebec; a French artillery officer whom we removed at Gibraltar from a vessel sailing from Bilbao to Montevideo; a Portuguese who was caught at Capetown en voyage for Lourenço Marques; an Icelander who arrived in a rubber boat in Iceland and succeeded in convincing the American authorities of his bona fides, but who after he had been received in London broke down under interrogation; and a Belgian who came here under the pretence of wishing to enlist in the Belgian forces, but has been proved to be working with the German Secret Service.
TRICYCLE, the Yugoslav double-cross agent who has been working for us for two and a half years, has recently spent three months in Lisbon where he had some interesting contacts with the chief German spy-master in that town.
The spy-master firmly believes in the existence of the rocket gun, the production of which has he says, been delayed for about two months by British raids. It should be in action by December.
The spy master also gave TRICYCLE the impression that he was aware that TRICYCLE was double-crossing him, and was anxious himself to come over to our side. He said that he saw no hope of a German victory and that if he could get a British passport which would enable him to live in peace after the war, he might be prepared to consider any reasonable offer. While this spy master has in his possession an enormous amount of knowledge which would be very valuable, his defection at the present time would compromise a great many of the agents who are working under him, and in whom the Germans hitherto have had confidence, such as TRICYCLE himself and several others. TRICYCLE returned from Portugal with a further large sum of German money.
The German Secret Service believe at the present time that they were receiving information from the Portuguese and Swiss Consulates in the United Kingdom, and also from a source which is supposed to report to Stockholm from Great Britain. The information which they receive from these various sources is of extraordinarily poor quality, and we believe the reports are, in fact, manufactured by some neutral country and largely fabricated.
This short draft is curious because although the second version expanded and identified the Italian spy from Lourenço Marques as Manfredo Manna, and the German spy in Canada as Waldemar Janowsky, references to four recently captured, unnamed enemy agents, the French artillery officer detained in Gibraltar, the Portuguese at Cape Town, the Icelander and the Belgia
n were removed entirely. While it is true that the Icelandic case of the spy named Fridrikson would be reinstated in the very next report (Chapter 7), the other three were never mentioned again. Nor was the intriguing source reporting to Stockholm, which almost certainly was a reference to the then very current JOSEPHINE investigation in which Anthony Blunt had played a major role. The source was discovered to be the Swedish naval attaché, Count Johan G. Oxenstierna, who was quietly removed from his post at the Foreign Office’s request and replaced by the King’s grandson, Prince Bertil. For whatever reason, this passage was removed from the report’s final version, and the JOSEPHINE investigation was not mentioned again.
* * *
Petrie’s account of the Franz Mayr case is the first of the MI5 reports to deal with the Middle East, where Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) operated as the organisation’s regional surrogate. Mayr himself was a Sicherheitsdienst officer who had worked separately from his Abwehr counterpart, Berthold Schultze-Holtus, operating under vice consular cover in Tabriz. Wireless traffic from both men was monitored, and Mayr only narrowly escaped a trap in November 1942 when he was betrayed by an associate. However, some of his documents were recovered, and these compromised much of his network, leading to the arrest of 150 suspects, including General Fazlallah Zahedi, the senior Persian officer in Isfahan, and forty of his subordinates. Meanwhile, ISOS intercepts showed that three SD agents accompanied by a Farsi interpreter had been dropped in support of Schultze-Holtus at the end of July.
Mayr’s arrest, at gunpoint in August 1943 by the Defence Security Officer Joe Spencer, was a major breakthrough for SIME and won Spencer, a pre-war petroleum engineer, the DSO. He and his deputy, Alan Roger, were then preoccupied with the analysis of the captured material, which resulted in the construction of a vast registry of enemy agents and their contacts, amounting to 13,700 individual files and 30,000 index cards.1
According to MI5, Mayr was a ‘master of subterfuge’ with a ‘strange personality’ who, aged 25, had fought in Poland with the 1st Prussian Armoured Division before working in Moscow for a German economic mission between December 1939 and February 1940. Upon his return to Berlin he had joined the SD, and in October that year travelled to Pavlevi with Ramon Gamotha, under Nouvelle Iran Express Company cover. Much of his activities became known following the discovery of his diary in Isfahan in November 1942 and he was forced into hiding. Nevertheless, at the end of March 1943 he was joined by six more agents who landed by parachute at Siyah Kuh on a mission code-named FRANZ, consisting of Karl Korel, a Persian interpreter who would succumb to illness soon afterwards, and radio operators Georg Grille, Hans Holzapel, Werner Rockstroh, Hans Graepe and Otto Schwerdt.
The first of the FRANZ team to be captured was Rockstroh, caught with his transmitter in a house in Tehran where Spencer soon afterwards also detained a dentist, Dr Qudsi. He turned out to be the uncle of Lily Sanjari, a 19-year-old who had been Gamotha’s secretary, and was still Mayr’s mistress. When the dentist’s home was raided Holzapel and his radio set were seized, and on 26 August Sanjari led Spencer to Grille’s hideout, where his transmitter was also recovered. Finally, Mayr too was betrayed, and he was taken into custody. Spencer then exploited the situation further by using Mayr’s name to lure two more saboteurs, members of the ANTON mission, Günther Blume and Ernst Kondgen, into an ambush.
In October Mayr was flown to Cairo for further interrogation, and while in captivity was the subject of an exchange offer from the Germans, who evidently regarded him highly. The approach was rejected by the British authorities, and Mayr escaped from custody on 26 August 1946 with a fellow German PoW, Rudolf Nussbaumer. When Nussbaumer was recaptured he claimed that as a fugitive Mayr had been protected by high-ranking Egyptian army officers.
Mayr then turned up in Switzerland, carrying a forged British passport with French visas, and was arrested on 9 December in Zurich, only to be deported on 3 February 1947 into French hands to Letestetten, near Schaffhausen. He escaped from Malsbach on 5 March and was thought either to have travelled into the American zone or returned to Egypt. He later adopted the alias Peter Studermayer and became active in the Middle East, selling weapons in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. In March 1952 he was alleged to be in contact with General Gehlen’s Bundesnachrichtedienst.
* * *
In April 1943 an Italian pianist, Alfredo Manna, was identified by SIS’s Stopford Adams as Umberto Campini’s principal agent in Lourenço Marques, and it was decided, because of the threat he and his wife Berta posed through their reporting of Allied shipping on a radio channel to the Japanese Imperial Navy, that he should be brought to England for interrogation. As well as ISOS evidence, there was testimony from three of Campini’s other agents who had fallen into British hands. One was a Greek merchant marine officer, Homer Serafimides, who had been lured aboard a Greek vessel, the Leonidas, and taken to Durban. Also arrested was a pair of Portuguese, José Muno Im Oliveira and José Lourenço Manira, who both confirmed Manna’s status and admitted they had gathered shipping information from the docks for him. In addition, there was concern about German U-boats operating in the Mozambique Channel, and a wireless on the interned Italian tanker SS Gerusalemme.
The task of his abduction fell to SOE’s Nero Grieve and the local SIS officer, Malcolm Muggeridge, and his MI5 counterpart in South Africa, Michael Ryde. Their plan involved the beautiful Anna Levy, a 22-year-old South African dancer at the Casino Costa whom Manna had been attempting to seduce, but on 2 May she had agreed to a rendezvous at 9 p.m. behind the Variatas Theatre and to accompany him to a café on the road to Maranchas, some 12 miles from Lourenço Marques. On the way the couple were stopped by another car that had supposedly broken down that contained the local police chief, Abel Figuera (who was on Muggeridge’s payroll), and Levy’s most recent lover, Harry Maigger. When Manna stopped his Oldsmobile he was seized by the two men and driven across the border in Swaziland, where he was delivered to the police commissioner, Major Percy, and interrogated, using a questionnaire sent from London. Soon afterwards, without the knowledge of any South African officials, Manna was escorted to Durban, where he was hospitalised with appendicitis, but was then transported to England from Cape Town on 4 August aboard HMS Revenge. Manna finally reached London on 11 September and, in the mistaken belief that he had been attacked by Levy’s lover, who had dumped him in Swaziland, proceeded to make a lengthy confession. Almost immediately Manna acknowledged having been recruited by Campini in late 1941, and of having acted as his intermediary in dealing with agents. He identified many of them and later Manna would admit that he also worked as an agent for the German vice consul, Dr Leopold Werz, under cover of the Trans-Ocean News Agency, and had tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate two spies into South Africa. One, named Gonsales, had undertaken a mission in February 1942, but had not been heard of after the receipt of four letters, which were incomprehensible. The other agent failed when he was turned away at the border. He also confirmed the existence of a clandestine wireless operated in Lourenço Marques by Eduardo Quintinho.
* * *
The double-agents mentioned in the report were TRICYCLE, whose exploits would appear frequently, and JOSEF, the Russian seaman, but two, FIDO and THE WORM were entirely new. THE WORM was Stefan Zeiss, a 27-year-old Czech from Belgrade who had been recruited by Ivo Popov. He would eventually be employed by the Ministry of Economic Warfare in London. FIDO was a French pilot, Roger Grosjean, who arrived in England in July 1943 from Lisbon and when he underwent screening at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School he confessed that he had been recruited as an Abwehr spy and instructed to steal a plane, preferably a Mosquito, and fly it to Nazi-occupied territory. He was enrolled as a double-agent by MI5 but actually worked for the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action at its headquarters in Duke Street, St James’s, before being transferred in July 1944 to Algiers for a posting to a squadron at Meknes in Morocco, adopting the alias Francois Perrin. His contact with the Abwehr ceased in February 1944 whe
n a last attempt to obtain further instructions from the Germans failed. In April 1954 Grosjean completed a manuscript, The Sun is in Leo, in which he described his adventures, but it was not published before his death in Corsica in June 1975.2
* * *
The problem of TRICYCLE’s spymaster seeking to defect, as mentioned briefly by Petrie, was a dilemma that threatened the entire double-cross system. The Abwehr officer in question was Popov’s old friend Johnnie Jebsen, who had been assigned to Madrid and therefore was in possession of information about his organisation’s agents supposedly operating in England, including GARBO. If he defected, his German colleagues would assume that he would compromise all the agents he knew of, and take the appropriate countermeasures, which did not suit MI5. The solution was to persuade Jebsen to remain in place, giving him no hint that all his sources were actually already under British control. It was a dangerous strategy, but much of the double-cross system hinged on Lisbon and Madrid, and the priority was to retain the deception channels that had been so carefully developed. Thus a policy of procrastination was adopted, until the Gestapo intervened to settle the issue finally.
* * *
Friedrich Baumann, described as the Abwehr II sabotage expert in Madrid, was a very familiar figure to MI5, which had monitored his activities through ISOS since October 1940 and knew his real name to be Friedrich Blaum. This intercept material was the skeleton upon which other sources would add flesh for SIS’s analysts, and in August 1945 he was taken insto custody in Bremen by the US Counterintelligence Corps.
Although he was unaware of it, Baumann had been a target for SIS, which had skilfully placed a 22-year-old Czech girl, code-named ECCLESIASTIC in his path in Lisbon. She had been deployed successfully against one of his Abwehr colleagues, Franz Koschnik, and that operation had proved very successful. However, ECCLESIASTIC’s substantial feminine charms, directed by the redoubtable Klop Ustinov, evidently had not achieved quite the same results against Baumann.
