Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  Nest Bremen ended the war with some four hundred secret agents in its card index. It was the only Abwehr office whose files were recovered at the end of the war, so, counting the others, the number of spies and informers on file at Zentrale in Berlin must have run well into the thousands.19

  The Nazi security and intelligence services were also fairly simply structured. Before the war they comprised: (1) the security service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) under Heydrich; and, separately under Himmler, (2) the security police (or Sipo); (3) the criminal investigation police (Krimminelpolizei, or Kripo); and (4) the Secret State Police (Geheimestaatspolizei, notoriously better known by its abbreviation, the Gestapo). The first was set up originally to gather intelligence on the Nazi party’s political rivals and expanded as time went on to surveillance of just about every aspect of German national life. The second and third had the normal police tasks, while the fourth was an organization deliberately designed for abduction, torture, and murder.

  The Gestapo’s primary mandate was to arrest and eliminate the “internal enemies” identified by the SD. These typically included politicians, Jews, Freemasons, church leaders, and generally anyone critical of the regime. As time went on, the Gestapo increasingly acted on its own in defining and liquidating “undesirables.” When dealing with German citizens, there was some token deference to an individual’s legal rights, but in the occupied countries, no such rights were recognized.

  The SD and the three police services were consolidated under Heydrich at the start of the war as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Head Office. It became a bureaucracy like any other government department, except that its mandate was the wholesale suppression of human rights, and murder.

  The functions of the RSHA were grouped into numbered offices. Thus Amt IIIB was engaged in promulgating “public health,” which in Nazi parlance meant compulsory abortions on female slave-labourers, denying education to children in conquered territories, and the “resettlement” of ethnic minorities. Amt IIIC was charged with controlling education and undermining organized religion. It named university professors and manipulated scientific research while promoting neo-pagan festivals and cultural events as alternatives to Christian festivals. Amt IV was the Gestapo, with Amt IVA being responsible for suppressing every form of political dissent, Amt IVB for the persecution of Jews and other minorities, and Amt IVC for the administration of concentration camps. Amt VI collected foreign political intelligence.20

  What made all this madness possible was Amt I, the personnel office. It undertook to find the right people for the various departments and tasks: psychopaths and sadists for the Gestapo and for the murder squads of the Einsatzkommandos in Russia, bigots and criminals for Amt III, and others with a wide range of character flaws and emotional defects that could be put to good use bullying their fellow human beings. As one RSHA insider described it, the model Gestapo man was “without any moral scruple, even without any conception of moral values, cunning to the point of brilliance, with sadistic leanings and definite pathological tendencies.”21 It was Amt I’s task to obtain such “raw material.”

  At the top of this pyramid of terror was Heydrich, now thirty-five and now with the title “Chief of the Security Police and SD.” He was unusual for an ardent Nazi in that he was an intellectual, cultured, and a gifted musician, playing the violin with skill and sensitivity. Yet with a pen stroke he routinely ordered the deportation, even the murder, of hundreds, thousands, or millions of individuals. He was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of European Jews that formally began in 1942. It was as though his mind and his conscience were separated by a pane of frosted glass; what he did not see, he could not feel, and what he could not feel, he did not care about.

  There were normal human feelings in Heydrich, however. Canaris quickly befriended him and even bought a house in the same street when he and his family moved to Berlin in 1935. The two families socialized, playing croquet in the afternoons and having dinners together. Heydrich often expressed his suspicion of Canaris to his subordinates, but he could never shake the deference felt by a former cadet for his former commander.22

  Canaris was Germany’s spymaster-in-chief. His fundamental business was deceit. He well appreciated the ancient axiom: The most dangerous enemy is he who poses as your friend. He was just such a friend to Heydrich.

  Canaris was to use this, and use it well.

  Like old wine cellared too long, Britain’s secret services, MI5 and MI6, had become somewhat musty over the economically parched years of the 1920s and ’30s. There were no fresh brooms to sweep their porches of entrenched ideas firmly rooted in past experiences.

  The double agent, for instance, was still a novel concept to Britain’s handful of counter-espionage officers in the late 1930s. During the First World War, it was government policy that spies captured in the United Kingdom were invariably to be either imprisoned or executed; there was little incentive for Vernon Kell’s Security Service — first MO5g and then MI5 — to experiment with having them continue to report back to their spymasters as if still free, and so be used to feed the enemy disinformation. Twenty years later, little had changed.

  In 1938, however, following talks with the French Deuxième Bureau, MI5 decided to give it a try. A Major Sinclair was assigned the task, but progress was modest, given that before the Second World War the resources for finding spies in the first place were meagre. Britain in peacetime largely respected the customary rules for freedom of movement and individual privacy.23

  The predecessor of the Secret Intelligence Service, on the other hand — Mansfield Cumming’s MI1(c) and then afterward MI6 — had used double agents extensively during the First World War, especially against the German secret service operating in France and neutral Holland.24 MI6 continued to use them in the interwar years against a new adversary, the intelligence services of Soviet Russia operating in the countries of Western Europe. MI6 officers were posted as passport control officers (PCOs) in the embassies abroad, where they screened for possible spies using the simple but ingenious principle that it would be necessary for all foreigners heading for British territory to check in first with British passport control.

  Not much is known of the codes and ciphers used by the PCOs and their sub-agents during the 1930s, but apparently they were not of a very high order. For the most part, intelligence collected from spies in foreign lands could be sent back to England by diplomatic bag or mailed, and it was assumed that other countries did the same. As for MI5, it relegated “ciphers” to its female support staff, so it can be safely assumed that when the war began in 1939, MI5 officers were largely ignorant on the subject.25

  MI6 had had an advantage. Unlike the United States, which dismantled its wartime code- and cipher-breaking agency in the late 1920s, Britain’s Foreign Office saw to it that the Admiralty’s similar and spectacularly successful “Room 40,” and the code-breaking unit of the War Office, MI1(b), were retained with their original staffs largely intact. Reorganized as the Government Code & Cipher School — a cover implying only oversight of government ciphers — its real mission was peacetime espionage, the primary target being the intercepted enciphered telegrams of foreign diplomats. This properly put its twenty-five cryptographers under MI6 and its chief (after 1923), Admiral Hugh Sinclair.26

  British intelligence — the term encompassing all government organizations with an active or potential role in foreign intelligence gathering — extended its reach to all international communications. By 1939, through government carrot-and-stick policies toward private corporations, all but a handful of the world’s undersea telegraph cables passed at some point through British or Commonwealth territory. It was the same with the international mails. Most letters posted from one continent to another had to go through a British choke point. This enabled MI6 to have almost anyone’s overseas letter or telegram intercepted and looked at. It was a remarkable achievement.27

  MI5, of course, c
ould have letters and cables intercepted at home, but, with the onset of war, its requirements took firm second place to those of MI6 and the intelligence departments of the armed forces. MC1 (Military Censorship 1) was under the War Office and headquartered along with MC4 (Telegraph Censorship) in the former Wormwood Scrubs Prison along with the MI5’s archive and library, the Registry. The chief military censor was rebuked at the beginning of 1940 for MC1 spending too much effort examining letters and telegrams for security reasons rather than for intelligence gathering.28 The fact was, MI5 was the weak sister of Britain’s secret services. From the 1917 Russian Revolution on, it had focused mainly on domestic labour discontent, first in the armament industries during the war, and then, afterward, more broadly in the working classes. The Bolsheviks in Russia had seized estates, destroyed the nobility, and had executed the British king’s cousin, Czar Nicolas II. Visions of similar phalanxes of grimy workers spilling out of the industrial ghettos of England armed with shovels and coal rakes haunted the Establishment in Britain. This led Vernon Kell, MI5’s director from its pre–First World War beginnings, to sideline the task of countering foreign espionage in favour of deploying most of his resources in the 1920s and ’30s against communist subversion in Britain’s labour movement.29

  Indeed, even in the mid-1930s, when Nazi Germany and fascist Italy became ever more clearly threats to Britain’s interests, MI5’s response was anti-subversion rather than counter-espionage, the principal effort being to infiltrate homegrown German- and Italian-leaning fascist organizations. Up to the outbreak of war, only one officer, Colonel W.E. Hinchley-Cooke, was working full-time on German counter-espionage, while Italy did not even rate attention. “There was a natural tendency not to take the military threat from Italy very seriously,” noted one MI5 officer looking back at those early days.30

  The tools MI5’s two dozen or so officers had to work with were basic: a plainclothes team of six to shadow suspects; Home Office warrants (HOWs) giving permission to open mail and listen in on telephone conversations; paid and unpaid informers; and a huge collection of files on individuals who had come to notice, generally for something they had done or said that was “Bolshi.” This latter was the Registry, and accounted for eighty of the 103 mainly female, mainly clerical staff who backed up the officers who led the various sections. It kept thousands of names and the “person files” (PFs) that went with them. It served as memory bank to both MI5 and MI6.31

  MI5 did get a chance to move forward with the times. In mid-1938, with tensions mounting over Hitler’s threats to Czechoslovakia, Lieutenant-Colonel Adrian Simpson was appointed adviser to MI5 on matters to do with wireless interception. He had been chief of MI1(b), the code- and cipher-breaking agency of the army (the War Office) during the previous war, and a senior executive with the Marconi Telegraph Company since.32 Advances in technology had made the wireless transmitter a practical and available alternative to the mails for spies reporting to their home countries, and Simpson proposed that MI5 set up a wireless listening section capable of detecting their transmissions. It was to consist of fixed stations and mobile units to close in locally.

  MI5 rejected the idea, however, being firmly of the view that German agents would only be using the mails or couriers to send in their reports. The matter was turned back to the War Office, which responded by creating MI1(g), a new military intelligence section consisting of a veteran First World War signals officer and two or three staff who were given space in Wormwood Scrubs along with MI5 and the Telegraph Censorship Department. There they received reports from three fixed Post Office wireless receiving stations with direction-finding capability and twenty-seven “volunteer interceptors” — amateur radio operators scattered across the country. MI5’s role was to make the appropriate inquiries when suspicious transmissions were located, and to call in the police where warranted.33 This was the responsibility of B3, a one-man section of MI5 that also looked after reports of suspicious lights and carrier-pigeon sightings.

  In contrast, when prodded by the Foreign Office, MI6 undertook to develop its own secret wireless service. The task was given in 1938 to a former First World War signals officer, Captain Richard Gambier-Parry, whose first priority was to develop quick and secure communications for key diplomatic posts abroad. He began by recruiting experienced wireless operators from the merchant marine. He put them through additional training with Scotland Yard’s wireless section and outfitted them with the best available sending and receiving sets, mostly of American manufacture. He had operators in the embassies in Prague, Paris, and The Hague in time to wireless back to London the reaction in those capitals to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia.34

  The different ways in which MI5 and MI6 reacted to suggestions regarding wireless would turn out to be a fair indication of the mentalities of the two services on the eve of war.

  3

  September 1939–April 1940

  Arthur Owens was a weasel. No doubt about it. The forty-year-old Welshman with Canadian citizenship elicited instant dislike on first encounters. He was bony-faced, scrawny, and small, with nicotine-stained fingers and transparent, irregular, mismatched ears. “A typical Welsh underfed Cardiff type,” the police description concluded.1

  British intelligence was reminded that Owens was not so savoury by the arrival at Scotland Yard of Mrs. Owens in mid-August 1939, there to denounce her husband as a genuine German agent. Yes, she told her interviewers, she knew all about him working for the British while pretending to spy for the Germans, except, she said, he really was spying for the Germans. Now, according to his wife, he had gone off to Hamburg again, this time with a girlfriend, but no, that was not why she had decided to report him. He had been trying to get their son into his spy ring, and when she protested, he had threatened to shoot her. So here she was, doing her duty by disclosing that he was now in Germany with the most recent RAF code book.2

  Everything Mrs. Owens said was true. MI6 had originally acquired Owens as a secret agent in 1936. He had first presented himself to Naval Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty as an electrical engineer who often visited Germany and who might be able to bring back the occasional tidbit of military interest. The navy sent him along to MI6, which took him up on the offer.

  All seemed well for some months, until a letter from Owens to a known German secret service cover address was intercepted. It was written in open code and appeared to be talking about “toothpaste” (torpedoes) and “shaving cream” (submarines). A Major Vivian of MI6 discussed it earnestly with his superiors and it was thought that perhaps Owens was playing the Germans along and that he would reveal all shortly.3 Six months later he did.

  Owens claimed that one of his informants in Germany, a man named Pieper,4 had turned out to be working for the German secret intelligence service (the Abwehr) and had proposed that he do so too. After several cloak-and-dagger meetings, he agreed, figuring it would enable him to better help the British by reporting what was asked of him. The Germans, he assured his listeners, only wanted him to work as a “straight” spy; there was no thought of using him as a double agent.

  Owens, of course, was offering to be a double agent for the British, and while MI6 officially turned him down, it used him in that capacity anyway. For the next two years, he was allowed to collect information for the Germans so long as he occasionally reported his activities and contacts to Scotland Yard’s counter-intelligence division, Special Branch. His letters continued to be intercepted, but they never contained anything of importance.5

  In January 1939, Owens reported that he had received a transmitter from the Germans. It had been deposited for him in a left-luggage locker at Victoria Station in London, and he brought it in to Scotland Yard, where it was examined. It was given back to him; however, his intercepted letters indicated that he could not get it to work. It was probably disabled at MI5’s request, for this was the Security Service’s first “concrete” indication that Germany intended
to have its spies communicate by wireless, and it was not set up to handle the eventuality.6

  Nothing much happened for the next six months. Owens continued to report occasionally to Special Branch and his correspondence continued to be monitored, but nothing harmful was found. Much later, however, it was discovered that the Germans had given him a second cover address and that Owens’s son had used it to send them sketch maps of the aerodromes at Biggin Hill and Kenley. Owens could have been secretly using this channel, too.7

  Mrs. Owens then made her appearance at Scotland Yard. Among other things, she indicated that her husband really did have a working transmitter and that he drove out into the countryside to use it. She said his secret cipher was based on the word congratulations, each letter being assigned a number. He had since disposed of the transmitter, she added, and the last time she saw him, he had been drinking heavily, depressed by the growing certainty of war. He was thinking of coming over to the British once and for all.8

  Arrangements were made to arrest Owens whenever he showed up again.

  On September 4, the day after Britain declared war over Germany’s invasion of Poland, Owens telephoned his usual contact at Scotland Yard to say that he wanted to cut his ties with the Germans. They arranged to meet at Waterloo Station, but this time there was no going off for a private chat. Instead of one inspector, there were two policemen and a bus ride to Wandsworth Prison. As the doors of that venerable institution opened to receive him, Owens offered as proof of his loyalty the address of his girlfriend’s flat. His wireless set, he said, would be found in the bathroom.