Churchill's Spy Files

by Nigel West

  Ledebur also gave a profile of Prince von Hohenlohe, who had previously been mentioned by HARLEQUIN (Chapter 27):

  Descended from Austrian branch which resided in Bohemia for more than a century; in 1925 married wealthy Spanish–Mexican heiress, Yturbe.

  Took over family estate at Rottenhaus with money given him by his wife to provide for his parents, sisters, brothers. Before Franco regime, lived most of time at Rottenhaus, Czechoslovakia. About 15 years ago became citizen of Principality of Lichtenstein. Now behaves like a Spanish grandee; one of his daughters married to titled Spaniard.

  Every year during war he goes to France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland, having business interests everywhere. Three years ago became representative of Skoda Works for Western Europe; as manager for France appointed Dr Mueler, who came from Cologne and might be the twin brother of Dr. Goebbels. As Skoda manager in Spain has Reinhold Spitzi.4

  Close relations with Allied embassies in Madrid and Berne.

  His brother, one of twins, nicknamed ‘Zwauserl’ who belonged to one of Jewish Brigades of Waffen SS, with headquarters in rue Galilee, but whose position was not very secure, as he had quarreled with his Obergruppenführer and nearly been dismissed. Max Hohenlohe, disgusted that brother should be working for such a disreputable service, approached Ledebur in spring of 1944 with request that he obtain position for him with Abwehr. Ledebur obtained such a bad impression of the man, enormously fat, with spectacles; of distinctly Jewish appearance, that he never pursued the matter.

  As well as drafting a lengthy account of his work for the Abwehr, detailing all his activities and contacts, he described the Madrid KO’s operations, and confirmed that it had identified a Colonel Wren as the local SIS representative, and Jack Ivens as his ‘gangster’. This was certainly accurate in respect of Section V’s Ivens. His final report amounted to eighty-six pages of narrative, with a further 100 pages of appendices, ‘every word of which was of value’, according to Helenus Milmo.

  Ledebur remained at Camp 020 until October 1945, when he was flown to the British zone in Austria. He later moved to Argentina. He married again in 1954, had two children and died in Buenos Aires in December 1963.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Early in 1944 Guy Liddell reflected on how MI5 had performed during the previous twelve months:

  Buster Milmo has made out his analysis of Camp 020 cases for the year 1943. The total number of cases held on 31 December 1943 was 120 as against 90 on the same date in 1942, and 54 on the same date in 1941. 67 were admitted in 1943, 18 released, 7 transferred and two prosecuted. Of those admitted in 1943, 54 proved to be spies as against 43 in the previous year. Of the above 54, there were 39 cases in which there were identifiable traces on ISOS (an increase from 55.8 to 72.2 per cent over the previous year). There were 21 cases in which the capture of the agent was attributable to ISOS, an increase from 35 per cent to 38.9 per cent. There were 15 cases for which there was no identifiable trace on ISOS at all, a decrease from 44.2 per cent to 27.8 per cent. Of the total of 54, 30 were captured abroad, as against 14 in the previous year, and 24 in the UK as against 29 in the previous year. Out of the total of 24 apprehended in the UK, only 22 were intended to operate in this country. Of these, ISOS showed traces of 16, and three were captured on account of ISOS. 16 gave themselves up or were double-agents ab initio. Of the three whose capture was attributable to ISOS, Rogerio de Menezes would certainly have been otherwise detected, Huysmans would almost certainly have been detected, while [Raymond] Lalou’s fate would have been problematical. Among those who came to this country de Graaf, Oswald Job and Steiner are really the only three that we can claim to have captured single-handedly.

  Liddell did not repeat this statistical exercise at the end of 1944, or at the conclusion of hostilities, but if he had done so, it is likely that the influence of ISOS, which continued to grow in volume, would have escalated proportionately. Certainly the source proved invaluable for the SCI units that accompanied the liberation forces across Europe, and quickly neutralised the threat from the enemy’s stay-behind networks, which were scooped up before they could become operational. Several of the organisers, such as Colonel Schneider, were caught, their circuits rapidly decapitated, and their agents, such as Mathilde Bernard and Yves Guilcher, cooperated fully to tie up any loose ends and ensure that the investigation of the Abwehr’s plans for post-occupation sabotage was comprehensive.

  It might have been anticipated, given MI5’s skill in the management of double-agents, that the Director-General would concentrate on the work undertaken by Tommy Robertson’s B1(a) section, which accounted for twenty-three double-agents mentioned in the reports, but it is striking that he kept a balance between them and the spies executed in London (Job, Neukermans and Vanhove); the defectors (Wurmann, Zech-Nantwich, Schagen and Ruser); the neutral diplomats (de Menezes, Alcazar de Velasco, Hellmuth and Kobbe); the Soviet spies (Springhall, Uren, Sheehan and Milne); and the adversary (Kliemann, Mayr, Baumann, Schneider, Scharf and Naujocks). Similarly, Petrie did not dwell on MI5’s counter-subversion role beyond some pointed remarks about Communists (Springhall, Robson, Tearse, Lee and Haston) and scarcely mentioned the more routine security aspects of sabotage and indiscretion.

  In terms of geographical coverage, the reports extended to South Africa (Leibbrandt), Lourenço Marques (Manna), Mombasa (Batos), Havana (Jude and Urzaiz), Vancouver (Kobbe), Buenos Aires (Hoppe, Perez and Leiro), Iceland (Tomsen, LAND SPIDER and COBWEB), Cairo (Mayr), and served to highlight MI5’s global reach and the importance of its overseas bases in Gibraltar (Bonzo, Botana, Muñoz, Buetto and Cordon Cuerca) and Trinidad (Balleta, Blay, Chambard, Pacheco, Laski and Liehr). Indeed, MI5 proved to be particularly adept at disrupting the Axis transatlantic courier route (Baticon and Oliveiro) and the Ybarra line wireless operators (Beltrán-Leiro and Ruiz). Combined together, these examples of espionage illustrated how an ISOS lead could result in an arrest far from the British Isles, and conclude in a revealing confession at Camp 020. As a model for integrated counter-intelligence, it was a seamless classic, even if the cryptographic foundation had shifted from being MI5’s creature to SIS.1

  The spies described to the Prime Minister who had been sent on missions to Great Britain ranged from the parachute arrivals (BASKET, Hansen, TATE and ZIGZAG); the French and Belgian pilots (FIDO, FATHER, SNIPER, Fraval and Creteur); and the false refugees (Hlidar, Job, Wilman and Wijckaert).

  Although Churchill would never have known it, a couple of the cases generated considerable inter-agency tension between MI5 and SIS (Polo and HAMLET) and between MI5 and SOE (Aben and Knoppens), and over the appearance of captured radio transmitters as supplied to MUTT and JEFF. He also would not have known that several of the cases mentioned with such optimism and certainty did not always end with the desired results. For example, Knut Brodersen, whose arrival in England was anticipated in March 1944 (Chapter 13), turned out to be a candidate for execution in a Treachery Act prosecution, but the controversial circumstances of how his confession was taken meant that the proceedings went no further than the magistrates’ court. In a similar case, where the trajectory turned out to be rather different to the one predicted by Petrie’s report, Juan Polo duped SIS into sending him to Gibraltar, thereby compromising MI9’s secret sea route from Seville. That blunder meant Polo had to be kept in isolation in England for the remainder of the war.

  It may have come as something of a surprise to Churchill that, towards the end of the war, MI5 played such a significant role with SHAEF in scooping up the British renegades who had collaborated with the Nazis, participating in the SCI units that tracked down the enemy’s stay-behind networks, and detaining members of the Abwehr. Camp 020 had proved so successful that CSDIC established a facility on the Continent at Diest’s citadel in Belgium before transferring the staff in June 1945 to a former spa resort at Bad Nenndorf in Germany.

  One aspect of what might be termed the intelligence war, rather overlooked by historians, is the scale of defec
tion from the German intelligence services beginning around mid-1943 when members of the Abwehr and SD effectively jumped ship. This may be partly because they were in a better position than most of their compatriots to see through the pervasive Nazi propaganda, and their better access, particularly in Lisbon, Madrid and Stockholm, to international opinion and foreign news reports. Staff based in the neutral capitals also had greater opportunities to make contact with their adversaries, and the time to negotiate terms.

  In coming to a final assessment of the reports’ value, one is bound to be struck by the very comprehensive nature of ISOS, which gave MI5 (and SIS) a huge advantage in dealing with such a large and well-organised opponent. Although it has become fashionable in recent times to denigrate the Abwehr, and portray the senior staff as corrupt and venal, the reports give a good idea of how much was known about its various branches. Individual personalities were ‘carded’ and their movements, tracked through ISOS, monitored as they moved from post to post. What was accomplished is even more impressive when one considers that virtually all personnel, operational and administrative, routinely adopted aliases and used code names in their communications. Although the quality of individual agents was sometimes poor, the staff personnel were generally well-educated, multilingual and often with a peacetime legal or police background.

  Particularly striking, as emerges from the foregoing, is the frequency with which some names reappeared. MI5 was a comparatively tiny organisation, and the cases mentioned in the Prime Minister’s reports revolved around just a few personalities: Herbert Hart managing ISOS, with Buster Milmo and Blanshard Stamp undertaking the analysis and answering to ‘DB’ Guy Liddell, who relied heavily on Tommy Robertson, Dick White and Anthony Blunt. For SIS it is Kim Philby and Felix Cowgill who emerge as the dominant counter-intelligence sages, especially when the enemy spies surfaced in Iberia. This handful of officers, supported behind the scenes by dozens of cryptanalysts, linguists, Section V staff overseas, DSOs at Gibraltar and Trinidad, and Security Control Officers at the British ports, interdicted Nazi infiltrators and transformed often fleeting, vague references in the ISOS traffic to specific suspects who required close investigation. These counter-espionage operations, encapsulated in Camp 020’s distinctive reports known as ‘yellow perils’, amounted to another side of the double-agent coin, B1(a)’s team of case officers who skilfully manipulated dozens of controlled enemy agents.

  Pitted against these resourceful young men, usually drawn for wartime intelligence duties only from the law and from academia, were the Abwehr’s Abstellen in the espionage front line in Iberia and Scandinavia. Once again, the same personalities recur, with Emil Kliemann and Karl Kuhlenthal appearing prominently in cases originating in Paris and Madrid, respectively.

  Any reader, even knowing that the Prime Minister’s staff would not have access to the reports, cannot but be impressed by the level of trust shown in Churchill, especially in respect of the acutely sensitive cryptographic dimension. A good example is the reference to a new cipher system such as the hitherto impenetrable triple transposition code delivered to assist a double-agent’s communications, which proved of great assistance to the cryptanalysts who, very likely, would not have been able to read the traffic without the crib. Yet Churchill was regarded as notoriously indiscreet and occasionally impetuous to the point of recklessness. He was always known to be fascinated by the inside track offered by intelligence, and Stewart Menzies was a familiar visitor delivering his distinctive buff coloured box containing selected intercept summaries and raw decrypts. The paradox is that although Churchill proved the past master of exploiting SIGINT, he exercised unusual discretion when he supervised the compilation of his magnum opus, The Second World War, published in six volumes between 1948 and 1954, which made no reference to double-agents, wireless intercepts or even FORTITUDE. Although Churchill had wanted to include mention of ULTRA and its influence on the conflict, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges, and ‘C’, Sir Stewart Menzies, had prevailed upon him to refrain from disclosure on the grounds that the techniques employed were still operational. Reluctantly, Churchill acquiesced, so we have no way of knowing the Prime Minister’s attitude to the MI5 case histories on which he had been briefed.

  Details of the XX Committee would not be released until 1972 when its former chairman, J.C. Masterman, received Cabinet Office permission to publish a slightly censored account of his own post-hostilities report on MI5’s double-agent operations compiled in 1945.2 The approved version made no mention of ISOS, and nor did Fred Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret, which was released two years later.3 Actually, the role played by ISK and ISOS in wartime counter-espionage, and the degree of integration between the Radio Security Service and MI5 would remain under wraps until 1981.4 Sir Michael Howard’s official history of strategic deception would not be released until September 19815 and Roger Hesketh’s Fortitude would have to wait until November 2000.6 Given Whitehall’s instinctive reticence, it is not surprising that the Prime Minister’s monthly reports would have to wait until after 2000 to be passed to The National Archives at Kew.7

  APPENDIX 1

  ESPIONAGE CASES

  Franciscus Aben

  A Dutch sea captain arrested in January 1944; he was detained at Camp 020 until 1946. He was imprisoned in the Netherlands for ten years. KV6/52.

  Angel Alcazar de Velasco

  A Spanish journalist, and press attaché at the London embassy, recruited by the Abwehr. KV2/3535; KV2/3536; KV2/3537; KV2/3538; KV2/3540; KV2/3541.

  Fernando Lipkau Balleta

  A Mexican recruited by the Abwehr; he was arrested in Trinidad in May 1943 and transferred to Camp 020. KV 2/2460.

  Joaquin Baticon

  A Y barra Line ship steward recruited in Buenos Aires who acted as an Abwehr courier; he was arrested at Trinidad in March 1943, transferred to New York and then detained in Camp 020. KV 2/2111.

  Basil Batos

  A Greek journalist and Abwehr spy; he was detained in Mombasa in January 1942 and incarcerated at Camp 020. KV2/1715.

  Friedrich Baumann

  The alias of Wolfgang Blaum, an Abwehr officer in charge of sabotage, based in Madrid between 1941 and 1945 who was captured and interrogated in 1945. KV2/1976.

  Charles Bedaux

  A French collaborator, Bedaux was arrested in North Africa and taken to Florida where he committed suicide in February 1944.

  Diego Beltrán-Leiro

  A wireless operator working on a Spanish merchant ship Monte Monjuich sailing to Buenos Aires, he was arrested on December 1943 and detained at Camp 020. KV 2/1939.

  Madeleine Bernard

  A French stay-behind agent arrested in Calvados in June 1944; she remained at Camp 020 for just five days.

  Hans Bertrand

  Belgian pilot and Abwehr agent code-named SNIPER by MI5.

  Hjalti Bjornsson

  An Icelandic spy for the Abwehr, landed by U-boat on Iceland in April 1944 with Ernst Fresenius and Sigardur Juliusson. He was arrested and interrogated at Camp 020, where he remained until he was deported from Hendon in August 1945. KV2/3009.

  Baron Manfredi de Blasis

  A suspected SD stay-behind agent in Italy, he was detained at Camp 020 in February 1944. KV2/1940.

  Andrés Bonzo

  An Italian spy arrested at Gibraltar on his return from a mission to Argentina. KV2/2702.

  Manuel Serna Botana

  An Abwehr suspect in Gibraltar; arrested in May 1943.

  Juan Brandes

  An Abwehr officer based in Lisbon suspected of fabricating information from an imaginary network of Swiss spies. KV 2/3295.

  Knut Brodersen

  An Abwehr agent infiltrated into England from Spain, Brodersen was detained at Camp 020. KV 2/547; KV2/548; KV 2/549; KV 2/550; KV2/551.

  Edouardo Buetto

  An Abwehr suspect in Gibraltar, Buetto was arrested in May 1943.

  Umberto Campini

  The Italian consul in Lorenço Marques, Campini w
as also the local representative of the Italian intelligence service. FO371/1739597.

  Comte Gabriel de Chaffault

  An Abwehr spy suspect, de Chaffault was detained in Gibraltar in August 1943 and transferred to Camp 020. He was returned to France in 1945 and was sentenced in February 1946 to five years’ imprisonment for collaboration. KV 2/2634.

  Henri Gravet Chambard

  A Japanese agent, Chambard was arrested in Trinidad in November 1943. KV 2/2305.

  William Craven

  A British renegade arrested and convicted in 1945. KV 2/486; KV 2/487; KV 2/488

  Jean Creteur

  A Belgian pilot and Abwehr spy incriminated by SNIPER.

  Luis Cordon Cuenca

  Abwehr saboteur arrested in Gibraltar in June 1943, tried in August, and executed in January 1944. KV 2/2114. His uncle, Augusto Cuenca, was also considered a German spy based in Gibraltar and his MI5 file is at KV2/1950.

  Antonie Damen

  A Dutch suspect and Abwehr agent. KV 2/134; KV 2/135; KV 2/136; KV 2/137; KV 2/138.

  Martial

  Durand A member of an Abwehr stay-behind organisation in Carentan in August 1944, Durand was interrogated at Camp 020 and then returned to Paris. KV 2/218.

  Carl Eitel

  Linked to a 1938 espionage case in the United States as a steward aboard the Bremen acting as a contact for Hamburg-Amerika Line couriers involved in the Günther Rumrich prosecution. KV 2/382; KV 2/383; KV 2/384; KV 2/385.

  Hans Fanto