One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  In another scheme designed to hide the code-breakers’ work at Bletchley Park and the signals intelligence funnelling into the Operational Intelligence Centre, Fleming introduced the cover story that British intelligence employed “Pendulum Practitioners” to find U-boat positions at sea by swinging pendulums over a map.70 Encouraged, he initiated other, far more exotic plans that were approved by the admiring Godfrey and developed right through to the final planning stages. They never came to full fruition, however, or were scrapped at the last moment because the circumstances changed.

  Operations Goldeneye and Tracer were two such plans from 1941. They were designed to enable Britain to keep monitoring what was happening in Spain and especially in the Mediterranean should Germany invade that country or General Franco enter into an alliance with Hitler. In February that year, as Fleming developed plans for Goldeneye, he visited Madrid, seeking ways to establish liaison offices in that city and also across the sea in Tangier with secure cipher leads to London. This operation seems to have had special meaning for Fleming: when the war was finally over, he bought an estate in Jamaica that he named Goldeneye, and there between 1951 and 1964 he wrote all twelve of his spy thrillers featuring the fictional MI6 officer James Bond.

  Operation Tracer was far more elaborate, planned to cope with a possible takeover of the strategically important British colony and military base of Gibraltar—the island guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Fleming had an underground bunker constructed there, carved into the towering rock face. If the Germans did manage to invade the island, a specially trained team of agents, including doctors and wireless operators, would be sealed into the cavern, with no chance of escape for at least a year and possibly much longer. Outfitted with provisions, wireless sets, and observation posts camouflaged from view, the team would report on Axis naval traffic squeezing through the narrow Strait of Gibraltar until the Allies could invade the island and rescue them. If time ran out, however, the agents would be left to their own devices. As things turned out, both Operations Goldeneye and Tracer were cancelled in August 1943, after the threat of a Nazi invasion of Spain had evaporated.

  As the urgency to win the war intensified, Fleming became ever bolder in his schemes. “It was an atmosphere,” Donald McLachlan wrote in his account of James Bond’s origins in Naval Intelligence, “in which ordinary ideas of fair play and morality were not so much exploded as subtly and indeed pleasantly corrupted.”71 Fleming had found his niche: dreaming up intelligence-driven operations fostered by desperation and opportunity, harnessed to action with Godfrey’s blessing and the formidable decentralized authority that came with it—all within a Churchill-inspired atmosphere that permitted and indeed encouraged the implementation of ruthless special operations.

  In this environment, as Britain now strove to gather in the intelligence it needed to keep its sea lanes open and protect them from attack by Germany’s navy, including its deadly U-boat fleet, the focus of the Admiralty took a new twist: to steal, or “pinch,” materials—whether from the Kriegsmarine’s ships at sea or, later, from their shore-based facilities—that were crucial to the code-breakers at Bletchley Park.

  THREE

  A RUTHLESS START

  Public opinion seems to regard incendiary bombing, napalm and propaganda as respectable activities that can be indulged in by civilized powers without loss of face. Murder, arson, eavesdropping and the use of noxious gasses are not quite U. Where should the line be drawn, is there a moral issue, or are our perceptions of right and wrong permanently blunted?1

  —ADMIRAL JOHN GODFREY, DIRECTOR NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION (RETIRED), 1966

  A solitary German Heinkel He 111 bomber, camouflaged with grey-green and sky-blue wash, dropped from the clouds to under fifteen hundred feet, trailing a long cone of smoke from what appeared to be its port engine, before levelling out temporarily, allowing the crew onboard to prepare for a dicey crash landing midway across the murky, frigid English Channel. The sight of a German bomber in obvious distress over the narrowest part of the Channel, near Dover, was not uncommon: during the previous eight weeks, beginning in September 1940, the Battle of Britain had shifted into its Blitz phase, which would last more than a year, with RAF fighters or British anti-aircraft gunners on the ground slowly racking up “kills” of German intruder aircraft with increasing frequency. Any German bomber unlucky enough to suffer damage over England, as this one surely had, might possibly be able to limp out to sea and into the waiting arms of a friendly German R- or M-boat—minesweeping vessels whose crews were generally on the alert to pluck downed men from the treacherous mid-Channel waters. With British cities ablaze, civilians dying or uprooted, the nation’s children and some of its cultural treasures evacuated inland or abroad, and the spectre of an imminent German invasion looming over England, the fate of falling into British hands was not the preferred option for any enemy personnel.

  On board the bomber, the crew of five prepared to “pancake” the wounded “bird” just as the second engine cut out, leaving the plane gliding silently in a permanent but gentle descent towards the water. At a thousand feet, one member threw caution aside and, abandoning the usual coded procedure, dispatched a distress call in plain German to any vessel in the area. A German patrol boat swiftly appeared. Crashing through the waves, it ploughed towards a position just a few hundred yards from what it expected would be the touchdown point of the falling bomber.

  Breaking the near silence, calls to “hang on tight” joined the whistle of the wind snaking through the bullet-riddled fuselage and the cracked panes of the nose canopy. The plane bounced once on the water and spun clockwise almost ninety degrees in a slow-motion pirouette before settling with its nose pointing towards the oncoming rescue craft, just fifteen hundred feet away and closing in fast. In no time, it seemed, the crew regained their senses and, with clockwork precision, following the drill they had rehearsed in training, popped off the cover of the escape hatch and deployed the tiny dinghy. Clad in regulation khaki Luftwaffe flight suits, sporting bulky yellow Mae West–style flotation devices, and with flight goggles hung around their necks, their wedge caps replaced by bloodied bandages, the men rowed hard towards their rescuers, waving frantically, shouting phrases in excited German clipped by the wind. The Räumboote, or R-boat, crew responded with the obligatory toss of a towline to draw them to the rescue craft.

  Just as their deliverance seemed complete, a siren blared, summoning the R-boat crew to action stations, followed by shouts of “Jabo! Jabo!” (for Jagdbomber, fighter bomber) and the ripping sound of 20 mm and 37 mm flak guns on the aft deck discharging shells skywards. The rising stream of yellow tracers picked out a tiny black speck descending rapidly from four thousand feet above, revealing within seconds the distinctive mono-winged shape of an RAF Lysander reconnaissance aircraft making straight for the scene, firing all the while. With the attention of the R-boat crew fully engaged in fending it off as it swooped down, the Lysander suddenly banked left to drop its bomb load hundreds of yards from its intended mark. At that moment the “German” bomber crew sprang into action to launch their Trojan Horse ploy.

  Pulling out weapons hidden on the rubber dinghy and tucked into their Luftwaffe flight suits, the British commandos boarded the R-boat, surprising the crew of seventeen and killing or capturing most in the first few seconds. After a cursory search of the boat to ensure they had subdued everyone on board, they located and seized their target: a three-rotor version of a German naval Enigma machine with its associated code books and setting sheets. Only then did they turn their attention to the captured crew members, whom they quickly ushered to the aft deck. In unison, the commandos raised their weapons and opened fire, eliminating all witnesses to the pinch, before unceremoniously tipping the bodies overboard and setting course for the nearest English port. This move indicated to the circling Lysander pilot above that the ruse, appropriately code-named Operation Ruthless, had succeeded and that the intelligence booty was en route to Commander I
an Fleming, the author of the scheme, waiting in the port of Dover to deliver the machine and its code books safely into the hands of the cryptographers at Bletchley Park.

  In reality, Operation Ruthless never came off as planned. Fleming, with co-operation from the RAF, had indeed drawn up a highly detailed “script” for the mission, as outlined above—one that demonstrated his characteristic flair for the dramatic. At the time, Operation Ruthless was highly secret, and it has long been believed that the operation never took place; even in the context of what was becoming Britain’s fight for survival, Ruthless crossed the line into the uncomfortable realm of war crimes. Some accounts have suggested that an official farther up the chain of command at Admiralty intelligence than his boss John Godfrey reined him in and forced the abortion of the mission. But those accounts are wrong: recently declassified files reveal that Ruthless did go ahead, following the script devised by Fleming, but twice it came up empty.

  Ruthless was conceived in early September 1940, in the wake of Winston Churchill’s “finest hour” speech, in which he warned that the very survival of Western civilization now rested with the British, who stood alone against Nazi tyranny. In this context, there can be little doubt that the “intelligence booty” Fleming sought in Ruthless was akin to the Holy Grail for the cryptographers at Bletchley Park. Fleming had dreamed up the operation to assist the gifted cryptographers who worked in Bletchley’s Naval Section—brilliant mathematicians, physicists and classical scholars such as Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, Alan Turing and Peter Twinn. These men now found themselves stymied in their critical struggle to break into German naval communications enciphered on a specially designed Enigma encryption machine. Despite their impressive intellectual efforts, they desperately needed “cribs,” or “cheats”—plain-language German text—that they could match up with a stretch of cipher text and thus discover the daily “key” setting, or password, which would unlock the contents of the top secret German messages. Depending on how quickly they could complete this process, they would provide Godfrey’s Naval Intelligence Division with access to real-time enemy naval communications. That breakthrough would give a priceless advantage to an island nation facing German invasion—one increasingly forced to rely on its overseas empire and on troops drawn from its far-flung dominions for the raw materials and manpower necessary to fight on in the war.

  Dilly Knox—the great Oxford classicist who had been recruited to work for the Royal Navy’s First World War cryptographic bureau housed in Room 40 of the Old Admiralty Building in London—had suggested to Fleming that he send a bogus signal to the Germans asking them to resend the upcoming keys for the Enigma machines—keys that changed daily. Politely rejecting the idea, Fleming informed Knox that “the possibility should be examined and something got ready and kept ready for use in an emergency.”2 In fact, Fleming considered the idea foolhardy: not only would it alert the Germans to what they were after, forcing them to strengthen their signals security, but it would reveal how much the Allies depended on this intelligence source and their potential method of decryption. Rather, he thought, the material had to be pinched, and with a velvet touch so the Germans would never catch on that their encryption system had been compromised in any fundamental way. It was one thing for the Germans to suspect the British of attempting to crack their codes and ciphers, or even succeeding on a limited and temporary basis; it was another to have clear proof of systematic success or the likely method of achieving it. As long as the British could continue to cover or camouflage their pinch operations and any breakthroughs they made, they could benefit from a steady stream of bona fide intelligence drawn from the proverbial horse’s mouth. The fundamental trait of any pinch operation is the need to “fox the enemy,” and that in its extreme form is what Fleming planned by engaging in wholesale murder for Operation Ruthless.

  On September 12, Fleming had outlined the plot for Ruthless in a memo to John Godfrey, who eagerly approved the plan. He then approached Mountbatten’s predecessor at Combined Operations, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, and asked him to organize Ruthless under the auspices of his headquarters. Fleming was quickly rebuffed: Keyes deemed the size of the operation “too small to come within their charter.”3 Undaunted, Godfrey decided to carry out the plan as an Admiralty operation and presented the scheme to the nascent Joint Intelligence Committee (where he sat as the navy’s representative), which quickly sanctioned the endeavour. Godfrey then obtained full approval from Admiral Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, and from Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, the head of the Royal Air Force, who offered support from No. 11 Fighter Group—which, two years later, would support the Dieppe operation. This co-operation was crucial because the RAF agreed not only to clear the vital airspace over the Channel needed at the height of the Battle of Britain but to provide the captured German bomber—the decoy—with a pilot to fly it. In addition, it would train the commandos who made up the rest of the crew, and supply their German uniforms and weapons. Newall also offered an operational base, a wireless net to track the events, and an RAF Lysander reconnaissance aircraft, plus a specially sequestered hangar to harbour the crew and the cover rumour that the crew were a special “spy party” set to land soon in Germany.4

  The mission would start at dawn, when the captured bomber would take off and join the tail of other German aircraft making their way home across the Channel from their nightly raids on British cities. With German rescue boats working on a grid pattern, it was more than likely that the “German” crew or the Lysander would find a lone victim not long after getting airborne. Once spotted, the reconnaissance aircraft would vector the bomber onto a collision course with the vessel, and the ruse would unfold: in quick succession the crew would send a distress signal, cut one engine, light a smoke candle to simulate a fire on board, dive quickly, and crash-land the plane in the Channel in the path of the advancing rescue boat. Once down safely, they would deploy their raft, load their weapons, and scuttle the bomber so it would sink quickly and remove any temptation on the part of the rescue boat to call in additional reinforcements for salvage purposes.

  With commandos in full paddle towards the rescue vessel, the Lysander would dive out of the sky, drawing the crew’s attention, and make a half-hearted strafing run, just missing the ship. Taking full advantage of this diversion, Fleming’s commando unit would then board the vessel, capture and kill the German crew, commandeer the vessel and its Enigma machine and code books, and hightail it back to the nearest British port, shadowed by RAF aircraft to prevent prying eyes from spotting the results of the privateering operation. In case things went wrong, Fleming prepared a cover story to obscure the pinch nature of the mission and prevent suspicion that the special party were after more “valuable targets than simply a rescue boat.”5 Should the commandos fall into German hands alive, their story—confirmed by follow-up communiqués dreamed up by Fleming—would be that the mission was “a lark by a group of young hot-heads who thought the war was too tame and wanted to have a go at the Germans. They had stolen a plane and equipment and had expected to get into trouble when they got back.”

  Contrary to historical accounts that claim Fleming’s flight of fancy never passed beyond the planning stage and was in fact curbed in utero, Ruthless did in fact go into operation on October 16, 1940. However, with no potential victim sighted, the mission was postponed, and Fleming, who had joined the crew at their air base before takeoff, was summoned back to the Admiralty in London to await a better opportunity, likely in the Portsmouth area. The surviving records show that Fleming remounted the operation just five days later, but it too suffered the same inglorious fate, leaving the pinch on hold.6

  Even though Operation Ruthless did not reach its desired dramatic climax, its authorization in as wild and cutthroat a fashion as Fleming originally conceived it clearly shows the lengths to which NID would go in order to obtain what the cryptographers at Bletchley needed to press on with their vital work. Perhaps more important, Ruthless demonstrates that operat
ions of a Machiavellian nature had found official acceptance with the heads of both the Royal Navy and the RAF, along with the Joint Intelligence Committee, all eager to foster pinch operations of varying brands at one of the most desperate and pivotal moments in British history.

  “Far be it from me to paint a rosy picture of the future,” Winston Churchill told a worried House of Commons in the weeks following Operation Ruthless. “Indeed, I do not think we should be justified in using any but the most sombre tones and colours while our people, our Empire and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley.”7 Britain, as the prime minister so eloquently expressed it, was “alone.” The fate of the democratic world, not only of the British Empire, hung in the balance: an accumulation of recent events had fundamentally changed the complexion of the entire conflict, and in particular of the critical war at sea.

  Just thirteen months before, in September 1939, Churchill had set out to “contain” the German fleet. A similar policy had been successfully adopted during the Great War of 1914–18, when a blockade had hemmed German surface and U-boat fleets into their home waters and prevented them from breaking out into the Atlantic Ocean, or elsewhere, to wreak havoc on British merchant shipping. For Great Britain, a small island nation with a far-flung empire, control of the sea routes has always been essential for its prosperity and, in times of conflict, its survival. Without an unfettered flow of imports and exports, it cannot—then or now—feed its people or maintain its economy. But as the world once again veered towards the outbreak of war, the naval authorities did not seem particularly worried. The German navy, they said, with fewer than thirty serviceable U-boats and only a small number of modern and powerful surface raiding craft, presented a potential rather than an imminent threat.