The Secrets of Station X

by Michael Smith

  Mr Birch gave a wonderful luncheon party. We toasted the Naval Section and anything else that came into our heads. It was great fun and by the time we went into the room where the luncheon was served, we were prepared for almost anything but not for the wonderful sight which met our eyes. The tables were positively groaning with Christmas fare. They were arranged in a T-shape. The top of the T was loaded with turkey, geese, and chicken while the table down the centre at which we all sat was decorated with a game pie, and fruit salad, cheese and various other dishes. We set to and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and I know that I was still beaming by the end of the day.

  Pat Wright was working in Hut 8 and was not one of those invited to Birch’s lunch. At the end of her shift she returned to her billet.

  I remember it was the first house I had come across that had a toilet in the garden and I had spent five minutes of my first evening there with my toilet bag touring around looking for the bathroom. But Mrs Tomlin was very good to me. She had an engine driver husband and a fireman son and she never took the tablecloth off. She always had food on the table. She was a very capable woman with a range of language I had never encountered before. I had been brought up fairly strictly and she used words I hardly knew the meaning of. I was working Christmas day and so I finished work at four o’clock and went back to my billet. Christmas dinner was over by now but she said: ‘Hello duck, saved you a bit of Christmas pudding. Here you are, this’ll make your shit black.’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or what to do. So I said thank you very much and ate it.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE INVASION OF EUROPE

  The intelligence collected by the British codebreakers ahead of D-Day and the invasion of Europe provided an extraordinarily comprehensive picture of the German defences and preparations. One of the most important pieces of intelligence came in late 1943 from the intercepted communications of Oshima Hiroshi, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, who toured the German fortification along the French Coast, the so-called Atlantic Wall, that October, providing a detailed rundown of German forces in both France and Belgium. In a report decyphered and translated in Hut 7, Oshima listed the number of divisions with their locations and subordination. He reported the proposed reinforcements ahead of the expected invasion, which included three SS Panzer Divisions, provided the full strength of German forces in France, which was 1.4million, and critically noted that ‘the Straits area’, i.e. the narrowest point of the Channel along the Pas de Calais and towards the Belgian border, was ‘given first place in German Army’s fortification scheme and troops dispositions, Normandy and Brittany coming next in importance’. This told the Allies that the Germans remained susceptible to the suggestion, which was increasingly being planted in their minds through the deception operations of the Double Cross Committee, that the D-Day landings were to take place on the Pas de Calais. At around the same time, a report signed by Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the German commander in chief in the West, and sent using the Red Enigma easily broken in Hut 6, warned, ‘It is certain that the enemy is methodically and on the largest scale proceeding with his preparations to attack’.

  The gaps in Oshima’s report, and there had seemed at the time to be very few, were more than filled in by Colonel Ito Seiichi, the Japanese Military Attaché who had made his own tour of the entire German coastal defences sending a massive 32-part report back to Tokyo. It gave a comprehensive account of every building in the fortifications and every installation, detailing everything from the heaviest artillery battery to the smallest collection of flame-throwers.

  The Japanese Military Attaché cypher had been broken by John Tiltman in 1942. Bill Sibley was one of the Japanese interpreters translating the Japanese Military Attaché’s messages.

  I was recruited from Balliol (I was a classicist, at the end of my first year) for the second Japanese language course at Bedford, which began, I think, in September 1942. We were summoned to a five-minute one-to-one interview with John Tiltman, having been pre-selected by the Master of Balliol A. D. Lindsay. I then went to Bletchley in the spring of 1943 and was set to work as a translator on the Japanese Military Attaché code until the end of the war, apart from a period of a few months when I was seconded to work on the Japanese Naval Attaché cypher. Our work began after the real cryptographers had done their work and identified where, in relation to the double substitution cypher keys, individual messages were located. The texts on which we worked were provided for us by ‘key-breakers’ who were not trained in the language, and whose task was to break the keys used in the messages relying on acquired familiarity with the frequencies of the bigrams in which the messages were composed before being encyphered. We lived an introverted existence, insulated from the real world. Our masters did occasionally send us words of encouragement, but I can’t recall that at our level we were ever told of any examples of our work having produced any positive results. Nobody knew what was going on in the rest of the place. It was a funny life, very funny, particularly the secrecy, and the oddity of some of the people. There was one famous professor of English who used to read about three detective novels a day. He used to walk around the grounds reading them.

  The codebreakers added to the significant intelligence they were already providing to Allied commanders when they broke into the Fish link between Berlin and von Rundstedt’s headquarters at St Germain, just outside Paris. The Germans had increased the security of Tunny, introducing the SZ42, but the arrival of Colossus in early 1944 led in March to the breaking at Bletchley of the Paris–Berlin link, which they codenamed Jellyfish, decyphering all of von Rundstedt’s high-grade communications with Hitler.

  The confirmation from the Japanese ambassador’s report, and other signals decyphered by Bletchley, that the Germans believed the Allies would land on the Pas de Calais led the Double Cross Committee to use the double agents to send false intelligence to the Germans that would reinforce them in that view, ensuring that large numbers of German forces were kept there and cutting the numbers that would face the Allied troops in Normandy.

  The Double Cross deception, codenamed Fortitude South, evolved rapidly during the early months of 1944, but the bare bones of the plan remained the same. The Germans were to be led to believe that the Normandy landings were a feint attack aimed at drawing German forces away from the main thrust of the Allied invasion, which would be against the Pas de Calais. This would ensure that the bulk of the German forces would be held back from the Normandy beaches, allowing the Allies time to establish a strong foothold in northern France from which they could break out towards Paris and then on to the German border.

  A completely mythical formation, the First United States Army Group (FUSAG), was supposedly commanded by Gen. George Patton, a hero of the invasion of Sicily and a man who the Germans would believe must be heavily involved in the invasion of Europe, as indeed he later would. FUSAG was supposedly grouped in East Anglia and south-eastern England and it was vital that the agents’ reports were coordinated to show that this was the case, and to downplay the mass of troops waiting in the south and south-west to attack the German defences in Normandy.

  The most spectacularly useful of the wireless agents deployed in the Fortitude South deception plan was the Spaniard Juan García Pujol, codename Garbo. He was an accomplished fraudster who originally offered his services to MI6 and was rejected as an obvious charlatan. Undaunted, he offered his services to the German Abwehr and agreed to go to England as a German spy. He then went not to London but to Lisbon where, armed with an out-of-date copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships and a Blue Guide to Great Britain, he began feeding false intelligence to the Germans for cash. He was discovered by the British who, concerned that he might discredit their own operation, brought him to the UK and began running him back at the Germans under British control. Garbo’s network of agents, all of them completely fictitious, was so large and had become so vital to the overall deception picture that virtually everything had to be closely coordinated on a day-to-day basis. The
most important of the other agents who, in the parlance of the Twenty Committee, ‘came up for D-Day’ was the triple agent Brutus. Roman Garby-Czerniawski, a Pole, had led the Interallié resistance network in France and, once it was uncovered, volunteered to work for the Abwehr in London in order to save the other members of his group from execution. On arrival in Britain he immediately told the authorities of his mission and was turned against the Germans. Two others should be mentioned as important to Fortitude South: the Yugoslav Dusko Popov, codenamed Tricycle, and Treasure, Natalie ‘Lily’ Sergueiv, a French citizen born in Russia whose family had fled in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution.

  These four were the main agents used to build up Fortitude South, the false picture of the intended target of D-Day. Tricycle and Brutus, who was supposedly a member of a Polish unit attached to FUSAG, provided an order of battle for the fictitious formation so detailed that the Germans were not just supplied with details of individual units, strengths and locations, they were even given reproductions of the insignia painted on the side of the FUSAG vehicles.

  Treasure’s role was to report from the West Country that there were very few troops there, further pushing the Germans towards the view that the main thrust of the attack would be against the Pas de Calais. But she came close to blowing the whole plan. Sent to Lisbon to collect a radio set from the Abwehr, she told a former acquaintance she met in the street that she was now working for the British secret service. When she returned to London, she confessed to considering warning the Abwehr as retribution for the British refusal to allow her to bring her dog to the UK without going through quarantine. She was swiftly retired and replaced by an MI5 operator imitating her distinctive method of sending Morse and her loquacious messages. For several months after D-Day, the Treasure character was kept active for no other reason than that her messages were so long-winded that Bletchley Park was able to follow them through the Abwehr communications network and use them as cribs. Denys Page, who had taken over from Oliver Strachey as head of the ISOS section in early 1942, told Masterman that the cribs supplied by Treasure and Brutus had ‘absolutely saved our bacon’ after the Germans introduced more secure systems during 1944.

  But by far the most important and complex role was played by Garbo. At one point, he had a network of twenty-seven supposed agents, some of whom still survived from his freelance period before the British recruited him. They included a Swiss businessman based in Bootle who had reported ‘drunken orgies and slack morals in amusement centres’ in Liverpool and an enthusiastic Venezuelan living in Glasgow who had noted the willingness of Clydeside dockers to ‘do anything for a litre of wine’. The Swiss businessman died of cancer in the autumn of 1942. But his widow continued working for Garbo, becoming virtually his personal assistant. The Venezuelan also grew in stature becoming Garbo’s official deputy and developing his own ring of agents in Scotland, one of whom was an ardent communist who actually believed he was working for the Soviet Union. The Abwehr codenamed this group of agents the Benedict Network. Garbo’s mistress, a secretary working in the offices of the War Cabinet, provided useful opportunities for valuable pillow talk. She, like the wireless operator, believed that her lover was a Spanish Republican. Garbo had also successfully set up a large network of agents in Wales, mostly Welsh Nationalists but led by an ex-seaman, ‘a thoroughly undesirable character’ who was working for purely mercenary reasons. At this point, it is probably worth reminding the reader that none of these people actually existed.

  Nevertheless, they all contributed to the German utter belief in Garbo as their most reliable source for intelligence on the Allied plans and set the scene for his key role in Fortitude. The German belief in the existence of FUSAG was steadily built up by a number of means apart from false reports from the double agents. Dummy invasion craft nicknamed ‘Big Bobs’ were left out in the open in east coast ports and mobile wireless vehicles travelled around south-east England broadcasting messages from a number of different locations to fool the German radio interception units.

  So fantastic was Garbo’s story that it would have been virtually impossible to imagine that the Germans would believe anything he said if it were not for the fact that, due to the breaking by Dilly Knox of the Abwehr Enigma, the British were able to decypher the messages between the Abwehr headquarters and Garbo’s controller in Madrid. These showed that, as with the Mincemeat deception, the Germans had swallowed it whole. This was not just because Garbo’s story carefully fitted in with all the other detail being sent by Brutus, Tricycle, Treasure and the other double agents. It was also because it fitted in completely with what the Germans were expecting, and that was known in detail as a result of the intercepts of messages between von Rundstedt and Hitler and between Oshima and his colleagues and their government in Tokyo. All of these messages, decyphered at Bletchley, were vital to the way in which the D-Day deception was developed and carefully nurtured to ensure its success.

  Throughout April and into May the intelligence from the Japanese diplomats in Berlin and the Jellyfish link between von Rundstedt and Berlin reaffirmed that the Germans believed the main British attack would be on the Pas de Calais, although there were also worrying occasional suggestions of an additional attack on Normandy. Concerns over the German mentions of Normandy led to a decision on 18 May to go all out on the Fortitude South deception pointing to the main Allied landing being on the Pas de Calais.

  There were a series of assessments from von Rundstedt on the Jellyfish link, broken with the aid of Colossus, which refined details of the German defences and the strengths and capabilities of the German forces. The Jellyfish link also included the complete order of battle of the German armoured divisions drawn from the detailed itinerary of a tour of inspection by the Inspector-General of the German Armoured Forces General Heinz Guderian.

  In early May, the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin made his own tour of the German defences. Sent on the Coral cypher machine – newly broken in a joint US/UK attack in which Hugh Alexander had played a leading role – the naval attaché’s report was read at Bletchley. It was more authoritative than that of Oshima, whose pro-German tendencies led him to accept unquestioningly what he was told. Rommel, who had been appointed to lead the main force resisting an invasion, intended ‘to destroy the enemy near the coast, most of all on the beaches, without allowing them to penetrate any considerable distance inland,’ the naval attaché said. ‘As defence against airborne operations he plans to cut communications between seaborne and airborne troops and to destroy them individually.’

  The number of staff at Bletchley Park had been dramatically increased in anticipation of the Allied invasion of Europe, reaching a total of 7,000 by June 1944. Morag Maclennan had by now been transferred out of the Bombe section into Hut 4, the Naval Section, where in the run-up to D-Day there was a minor security scare. ‘The girl who was most closely concerned with the Normandy beach landings went up to the Admiralty and was fully briefed,’ Maclennan said. ‘Bigoted was the name for anybody who was let into the great secret in the weeks leading up to D-Day. She was bigoted and immensely pleased with herself. We had this enormous map all the way down one wall of the coast of Holland right down to the south of France and she carefully underlined the beaches that they were going to land on. We were horrified at this and went along underlining every beach we could see from Holland down to France because the cleaners would come in and might notice.’

  Tommy Flowers and his men at Dollis Hill were already working on an updated version of Colossus. ‘The first processor contained 1,600 valves,’ Flowers said. ‘It worked, as designed, well enough, but we had not been able to make the processing fast enough, and with use we could see that it needed to be improved in several ways.’ Flowers was told that if his new Colossus was not ready by the beginning of June, it would be no use at all, which he rightly assumed meant that D-Day was to be at the beginning of June.

  We worked flat out for four months and met the deadline, but only just. I was at Bl
etchley Park on that historic day and had been since the morning of the previous day, with a number of other men, dealing with the last few difficulties that remained. In fact, the machine was fully ready for service for the first time during the small hours of the morning of 1 June.

  The decyphering girls in the Big Room of Hut 8 went on night shift just before midnight on 4 June 1944, unaware that the Allied invasion was about to be launched, said Pat Wright.

  They told us that D-Day was today and they wanted every possible message decoded as fast as possible. But then it was postponed because the weather was so bad and that meant we girls knew it was going to take place, so we had to stay there until D-Day. We slept where we could and worked when we could and of course then they set off on 6 June, and that was D-Day.

  Although the heads of the main sections were all bigoted and most people at Bletchley Park knew that the invasion of Europe was imminent, even fairly senior staff were not told when it was to come. ‘There was no point speculating when the balloon was going to go up,’ said Bill Bundy.

  So you didn’t give day-to-day thought to it really and it just so happened that the evening of June 5 there was a long scheduled party. I’m sure there was a moment’s thought given on high as to whether this ought to be kept and the instantaneous decision was that to cancel it would be far too much of a signal. So it went ahead and I remember we had a very pleasant group and drank martinis in which the role of vermouth was played by sherry and one had a really very nice time.

  Anyway, at midnight those of us who were on the night shift reported to our sections to work, and there waiting in the outer room just outside the watch was the head of Hut 6, Stuart Milner-Barry. He had been at the party and he was just sort of standing there on one leg watching the whole proceeding and one said: ‘Why is Stuart doing this at this hour?’ So we went to work and suddenly about 3 o’clock there was a real rustle in the room that got the traffic first and it was patent that something was happening on a big scale. Very shortly the word spread that there had been German traffic in clear, saying that paratroopers were dropping all over the place and it happened to be nearer Calais than Normandy so I’m sure it was one of the deception operations. We later learned that they were not paratroopers, they were bunches of straw, something that would show up on the radar in the same way.