Churchill's Spy Files

by Nigel West

  Records of these conversations have been found in the Telephone Journal of the German Seventh Army, which was captured by the Polish Armoured Division. The following two extracts, taken from the SHAEF Weekly Intelligence Summary of the 9th September 1944, are the most significant:-

  6 June 1944

  1655 hrs. Chief of Staff reports situation to Chief of Staff Western Command.

  Chief of Staff, Western Command (RUNDSTEDT’s H.Q.) emphasizes the desire of Supreme Command (HITLER) to have the enemy in the bridgehead annihilated by the evening of 6 June, since there exists a danger of additional sea and airborne landings for support. … The beachhead in CALVADOS must be cleaned up by NOT later than to-night.

  9 June 1944

  1530 hrs. Conversation of Field Marshal ROMMEL in Army Hq, with the Commanding General and Chief of Staff.

  The Chief of Staff expresses the opinion that the enemy, because of the increased resistance SOUTH of CHERBOURG, will commit more airborne troops in order to take possession of CHERBOURG rapidly.

  Field Marshal ROMMEL does NOT share this opinion, since the Supreme Command expects a large landing on the Channel Coast within the next few days, and therefore the enemy will NOT have more airborne troops available.

  20

  3 NOVEMBER 1944

  MI5’s very brief report for October 1944, completed in early November, confined itself to three enemy prisoners, all examples of intelligence personnel who disclosed valuable information after their capture in newly liberated areas, and four double-agents, LIPSTICK, BRONX, SNIPER and ROVER.

  The three German captives were Carl Eitel, arrested by the Americans in Nancy, Fritz Lorenz,1 who was seized in Namur, and Peter Schagen, an Abwehr defector in Madrid.

  OCTOBER 1944

  Out of the rabble of spies who are being rounded up in the field during October, twelve have been of sufficient interest to be sent home to this country for closer examination at our special interrogation centre. These have included several members of Himmler’s Secret Service, who have been able to supply us with a considerable amount of information, both about the organisation of this service in France and Belgium, and about individual agents whom the enemy proposed to leave behind after his retreat.

  One of these spies, Carl Eitel, is an old hand at the job. His name figured in the American spy trial of 1938 as a contact of agents working on German liners travelling from Europe to the USA. At the fall of France he was in Brittany and remained there working for the Germans till 1943, when he was sent by his masters on a mission to Lisbon. He there made contact with the Americans, who took him on as a special agent. In May 1944 he returned to Germany and was not heard of till he was arrested in Nancy after Americans had captured the town. At that time he pretended that he was still genuinely working for the Americans, but he was sent to this country in order that his story could be taken more fully and it rapidly became apparent that he had consistently lied, and that at the time of his capture by the Allies, was in fact still working for the Germans. His subsequent interrogation has provided a mass of interesting Intelligence, and has also revealed the fact that his career with the German Secret Service goes back even further than was supposed.

  A second spy of interest, Werner Lorenz, is a man of quite a different type. His main interests are politics and propaganda, and after joining the Ribbentrop Bureau in 1934, he became a close friend of Ribbentrop and frequently acted as his personal courier to this country when Ribbentrop was Ambassador here. ln 1940, on Ribbentrop’s advice, he joined Himmler’s Secret Service, and carried out a number of missions for it, mainly political in character. He was in Paris at the time of his capture by the Allies, and deserted to them shortly after.2 He has been able to provide us with much useful information about various secret German political organisations about which little was known from other sources.

  A third agent, Peter Schagen, was an important organiser of preparations for sabotage behind the lines after the German retreat. During the campaign in France this man escaped to Spain. There he got in touch with the Americans. From his information we have learnt much about the policy and methods in sabotage behind the Allied lines. It is clear that they intend to use long term methods, leaving sabotage material hidden so that agents can, at a much later date, be sent over to find and make use of it. Their first object will be to destroy important Allied material and their second to cause political trouble by the sudden outbreak of sabotage all over the country which might be attributed to the Communists, the FFI, the British or any other group which the Germans wished to discredit.

  Just before the fall of Paris the Security Service sent over an expert to take the necessary counter-measures against the German sabotage threat. This officer has examined the headquarters of the German Sabotage Service which was captured in the Château de Rocquiemcourt, near Paris. In this château there were found not only large quantities of sabotage material, but also files giving details of the organisation and lists of agents with whom material had been deposited. From this it was learned that the Germans have concealed nearly a thousand small dumps of bombs and sabotage equipment throughout France.

  One development of interest has taken place recently in connection with our special agents. The Germans have suddenly attempted to revive some cases which were thought to be completely dead. They have, for instance, recently revived contact with an agent, LIPSTICK, who had ceased to communicate with them for more than six months. Another agent, BRONX, who had sent material of a very low grade, has now been asked to pay a personal visit to the Peninsula. A third, SNIPER, has now been promised two wireless transmitters. A fourth agent, ROVER, whose letters to the Germans had not been answered for some months, has suddenly received a wireless message and has been able to establish contact with the Germans. A possible explanation of this revival of this activity is the influence of Himmler who for some months seems to have been surveying and revitalizing many parts of the German Security Service.

  3rd November 1944 Director General

  * * *

  The case of Peter Schagen is especially interesting as he was an Abwehr II defector who turned up unexpectedly at the US embassy in Madrid hoping to make his way to the United States with his 23-year-old French mistress, Jeanette Bertremieux. In fact, she had made the first approach to the Americans, through the US military attaché, without Schagen’s knowledge. Initially she had met a Lieutenant-Colonel Clark, but had been rebuffed, so she then talked to a Lieutenant-Colonel Hoffman, who was more receptive and introduced Schagen to the military attaché, Colonel Sharp, and to a member of the British embassy calling himself ‘Mr Simpson’. By negotiation it was agreed that Schagen would be taken to the British consulate in Seville before travelling to Gibraltar, and that a letter would be mailed from Barcelona, addressed to Jeanette, that he had flown back to Germany. In exchange, Sharp promised to have her returned safely to her parents’ home in France.

  Unknown to them, Schagen was a familiar figure to the analysts studying the ISOS traffic, who recognised him as the leader of a stay-behind sabotage organisation based in southern France.

  Schagen was flown to Hendon from Gibraltar and delivered to Camp 020 on 2 October 1944 for detailed interrogation. He proved entirely cooperative, his statements having been compared to numerous ISOS references. He was then returned to the custody of OSS’s X-2 branch in London in November 1944 and was flown to France, where he helped find and uncover nineteen Abwehr arms caches hidden in anticipation of a stay-behind sabotage campaign. However, this development caused dismay in the US, where G-2 expressed concern that Schagen had not been delivered to Washington DC, where he was due to be questioned by the FBI about his knowledge of pre-war Nazi activities in Brazil, where he had lived until the outbreak of war.

  * * *

  Born in 1900 and employed from August 1928 as a wine waiter on the Bremen and other Norddeutscher Lloyd transatlantic liners, Carl Eitel was recruited by the Abwehr’s Erich Pfeiffer in Bremen in 1934. His role as a courier was compr
omised in 1938 in the Karl Schluter espionage case when he was named in court by the FBI as a German spy. Consequently Eitel was put on the Abwehr’s reserve list, occasionally acting as a cut-out for Jean Frutos in Cherbourg, but in 1939 he was sent to Genoa to recruit seamen working for the American Export line ships SS Washington and Manhattan as agents. This episode was of intense interested to the FBI, who pursued three of them, Johann Kassner, Fred Ehrich and Karl Elwert, based on his testimony. In June 1940 he was posted to Brest, equipped with a wireless transmitter.

  In July 1943 Eitel was transferred to Lisbon to work as a seafront recruiter under Hans Bendixen, and was recruited in November under the code name SPEARHEAD by an OSS X-2 case officer using the alias Charlie Grey. In May 1944 he was recalled to Berlin for a mission to Vienna to assist in the repatriation to Egypt of Joseph Farrag, the purser off the liner Zamzam, and then was sent on another assignment to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, to organise stay-behind networks along France’s north-east coast, which was interrupted by his arrest in Nancy.

  MI5’s assessment of the uncritical attitude adopted by OSS when Eitel turned up in Lisbon is scarcely concealed:

  Early in 1944 Eitel, who was cautious enough to conceal not only his early espionage history but many of its most recent and compromising chapters, contacted the American Intelligence representatives in Lisbon with the offer of his services; he was ready to betray his masters of ten years’ standing while admitting only to five to reinsure his European future through American favour. The offer was accepted. Eitel supplied information on the Abwehr in general and its Lisbon personalities in particular; and he was used by his new contacts to ‘feed’ false information, directly and indirectly, to his full-time masters.

  Eitel was arrested in Nancy in September 1944 by the French, who handed him over to the US 3rd Army CIC at Chalons-sur-Marne. It ran him as a source until he was passed to Camp 020 in October 1944. Somewhat belatedly, and under intensive interrogation, Eitel was matched to an ISOS personality, code-named CARLOS, an analysis that showed he had lied constantly about the extent of his lengthy service for the Abwehr. He remained at Ham until July 1945, when he was delivered to CSDIC at Diest.

  The FBI concluded that Eitel had ‘unlimited information of infinite value’ regarding German espionage in the United States, but one of the priorities was to learn whether he had been responsible, after he had been recruited by OSS, for the betrayal of Juan Frutos, code-named DRAGOMAN. Certainly Eitel had identified Frutos as a German spy to the Americans, who had arrested him on 8 July at his home at 10 Avenue Aristide Briand as one of three Abwehr stay-behind agents active in Cherbourg. But had he then informed the Germans that OSS had run Frutos as a double-agent against them? According to his ISOS traffic, he had remained in radio contact with Wiesbaden until 20 July. Truly, Eitel was one of the slipperiest customers ever in the espionage business, apparently loyal only to himself, but the challenge was to assess the accuracy of his stories. For example, to prove his bona fides, he claimed to have conveyed two important items of information to ‘Colonel Grey’:

  The Portuguese consul in Dakar, a German spy, reported to the German embassy Lisbon that an Allied convoy of 60 ships, troops, materiel and naval escort was sailing on a certain date. This was wirelessed to Berlin by the embassy and a reply received that U-boats would handle. Subject reported to Colonel Grey who confirmed a week later that sailing postponed convoy saved. (March 1944)

  A Russian woman, agent of British Intelligence, was a double-agent in the employ of the Germans. She was flown to London from Lisbon by British in April 1944 and on return gave full report to Germans. Subject reported matter to Colonel Grey, latter presumably to British who confirmed.

  Both messages were extremely important, and the latter appeared to incriminate TREASURE, who exactly fitted the description given, and the date coincided with her most recent visit to Lisbon. Had she really given the Abwehr a ‘full report’ of her role of an MI5 double-agent? If so, she had been in a position to compromise much else besides to Buecking, a known IM personality in the Portugal KO. A search of the files revealed confirmation:

  Early in March the British Secret Service sent to Lisbon a Russian woman who got in touch with Buecking, whom she had known previously. She gave Buecking the name of the Chief of the British Secret Service in Lisbon (name not given in our message). Since then she has returned to London and is corresponding with Buecking.

  TREASURE’s MI5 file showed that she arrived in Lisbon on 3 March 1944, and after her return to London, immediately after her lunch with Emil Kliemann on 22 March, she remained active for MI5 over a further six months, until December 1944. She had been approved for participation in the FORTITUDE deception, reporting on her radio that there were not many troops to be seen in south-west England, thereby supporting the fiction of a concentration of Allied forces in the south-east. However, if TREASURE was compromised, her signals would be reinterpreted, and doubtless Kliemann’s other agent, DRAGONFLY would also come under suspicion.

  When pressed further, Eiten recalled more about his meeting on 22 April 1944 with Buecking, who had been drinking whisky in his chief’s apartment in Lisbon, and told him about:

  … his recent meeting with a Russian woman in Lisbon, whom he had known before the war. She was working for the British Intelligence service now, and he had met her in the street by chance. She had told him that her British chief in England, whom she named, had sent her to contact a certain person in Lisbon; she had given him the name and address. Through her he had learned a considerable amount about the British Secret Service. She was a dark, good-looking girl but he was afraid he could not mention any names … She had left Lisbon with the undertaking to keep in touch by mail. Eitel did not dare to question him more closely and Buecking went on to tell his agent that he would never make good in the Abwehr unless he got a really worthwhile contact like this woman.

  At a meeting a few days later with Colonel Grey, Eitel reported in outline his recent chat with Buecking, stressing his reference to the Russian woman agent.

  When checks were made with OSS X-2 in Lisbon, MI5 received confirmation that the name ‘Charlie Grey’ was an alias used with low-level agents, and that in fact Eiten had been handled by an OSS cut-out named Silverberg.

  MI5 finally concluded that Eitel’s only real contribution to the Allied cause was an intelligence questionnaire that he claimed had been entrusted to him as a microphotograph in August for delivery from Bremen to the Abwehr office in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, for distribution to the key agents run from Madrid, among them Hans Grimm. However, Eitel’s role as a courier had only lasted as far as his journey to Nancy, where he had gone to ground to await the Allies.

  The questionnaire, evidently assembled by Eins Marine in Berlin, showed the Kriegsmarine’s priorities at a moment when the U-boat fleet was under severe pressure from RAF Coastal Command and Royal Navy destroyers apparently taking advantage of new technology especially in the Bay of Biscay as submarines transitted into the Atlantic.

  Subject: Location Method Above Water

  Find out the following:

  1) The enemy’s most usual Radio Location apparatus, where and with what special objectives used; land, nautical and air equipment.

  2) The development and trial of radio location apparatus. The enemy plane. The trend of development.

  3) The names of the inventors, the designers, who at present direct development.

  4) The names and sites of the manufacturers. Where are the laboratories, experimental and testing centres.

  5) As precise as possible a possible a description of the apparatus; and the range.

  6) The instractions for the manipulation of the apparatus, and the methods used for measurement.

  7) The frequencies used by the enemy, his achievement and progress, especially in the region of 1 cm to 3 cm.

  8) The enemy’s jamming and misleading apparatus, description of how and where operated.

  9) What wireless observation apparatus the enemy uses
, description of how and where installed, the frequency bands engaged, the D.F. methods the effectiveness of the apparatus.

  10) The apparatus and procedure for the distinction between his own and enemy location apparatus.

  11) The instructions about enemy jammers on land, on board ship and in the air.

  12) The apparatus and procedure, which are used for artillery fire.

  13) The equipment of long-range recce aircraft and fighter bombers with search gear.

  14) The instructions about optical D.F. sets which are worked with ultra-red or possibly with ultra-violet beams; where and with what special objectives they are used – especially nautical and air apparatus ‘h.w.’

  15) As precise a description as possible of the apparatus, source of light, effect required, lens construction, angle of vision, the kind of filters used.

  16) The range of the apparatus, the effect of weather (thick fog).

  17) The instructions for thermo D.F. sets and their operation, especially against U-boats.

  Subject: The Enemy’s Underwater Location Against Submerged U-Boats

  The methods in respect of acoustic underwater location certainly consist on the one hand of Asdic location (Asdic apparatus, sound impulsion producer (Schallimpulseaseuger) with the receiver for eventual returning echoes) and on the other hand sound direction-finding (single listening for U-boat noises through listening apparatus).

  a) Are there yet other acoustic under water direction finders and methods?

  b) How long have these methods been in operation?

  c) As precise as possibly a description of these methods and of apparatus or gear which is necessary for their application.