Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  It is one of the great mysteries of the war. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring did open the battle with attacks on the Chain Home radar installations, the radio masts being readily visible from the air. Bunkers had not been provided for the on-site staff, so there were immediate casualties and some stations went blind. Then, for some reason, Göring eased up on the attacks, concentrating on airfields and RAF infrastructure instead. All historians agree it was a decisive mistake. Had he put out the RAF’s eyes first, he would have won the battle.

  The fighter-to-fighter struggle in the sky over southeast England was at its height when McCarthy arrived back in London on August 20. He had played his part. A-3554 had been established as a spy reporting from the Bristol area, initially on his own, later through A-3504. FRANK was rechristened BISCUIT, soon to become primarily a notional double agent because when A-3504’s messages included reports from A-3554, McCarthy was not needed to write them.

  McCarthy may have had his own thoughts as to the origin of those Thames House messages. In the days following his return, with the contrails of the enemy criss-crossing the sky over the sunny fields and towns of southeast England, he would get drunk every so often, phone Owens up, and offer to come over and kill him.24

  8

  September–October 1940

  In early September 1940, after failing to defeat the RAF over England, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring shifted emphasis to bombing cities, and gradually to bombing by night. The British called it the Blitz, and London, Birmingham, Coventry, and other industrial and commercial centres suffered an autumn rain of incendiaries and high explosives.

  On November 14, Coventry was devastated by some five-hundred-plus bombers. Birmingham was savagely hit on November 19. On Christmas Eve, 526 died in the fires in Manchester. The bombers were still under orders to go after British war-related industry, as per the 1937 League of Nations resolution that limited bombing to military targets, but as factories were inevitably embedded in urban areas, massive civilian damage and casualties were bound to occur. Public support for the war, however, solidified, and it deeply touched Churchill. His young aide, John Colville, noted in his diary:

  Friday, Sept. 20, 1940

  He [the PM] is becoming less and less benevolent toward the Germans — having been much moved by examples of their frightfulness in Wandsworth which he has been to see: a landmine caused very great devastation there — and talks about castrating the lot. He says there will be no nonsense about a “just peace.” I feel sure this is the wrong attitude — not only immoral but unwise….1

  But the effects of the bombings were indeed frightful. According to some from the Wandsworth district who endured it,

  When a bomb lands you get an outward explosion and then equally as much damage is done when it is drawn in again. Often you found places with walls sucked off. It was as if you were looking into a doll’s house with the back off. You could see everything there. The staircase was still there. The beds and all the furniture were still there….

  If the bombs dropped in places where a lot of people had been killed they were telling us how many bodies had been picked up. How many limbs they had found — how many heads — horrible things like that….2

  For Göring, however, cities were more lucrative than airfields. They were large, built-up areas, and when bombs missed their designated military targets, they still were not wasted.

  Göring also had some incentive to switch to bombing London by night. On August 12, A-3504 had sent along this:

  12.8.40 SECRET To OKW-Abw I Luft/E

  Searchlight sites are to be found on top of the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England and Selfridges near Marble Arch.3

  If this information was true, the bomber pilots needed only to position themselves according to the lights to stand a good chance of landing a dose of high explosive on one of Britain’s great monuments — the Parliament at Westminster perhaps (actually hit), or St Paul’s Cathedral (buildings destroyed across the street), or Trafalgar Square (cratered, but Nelson’s Column remained okay). The loss of a few of these would be a great blow to British morale.

  The message cannot be easily explained. It was sent when the air battle over England was primarily by day, and when the German aim was still to defeat the RAF by attrition and by destroying its infrastructure. Attacks on urban areas and widespread night bombing did not get underway until the autumn.

  What is also odd is that Robertson continued to have Owens tour the countryside as before, visiting air bases to see what he could see. This may have made sense when Owens was meeting his German controllers on the Continent face-to-face, but it was hardly necessary when contact was limited to wireless.

  Nevertheless, even as British and German pilots duelled in the skies over England that desperate summer and fall of 1940, Owens continued to count aircraft at aerodromes:

  27.8.40

  [Unknown MI5 staffer]

  I asked if it was all right for SNOW to go out this afternoon and see if he can get any information about aerodromes or air raid damage. Captain Robertson said anything he could get in this line could be sent over.

  Rang Burton and told him SNOW was to go out, suggesting Northolt and other places he could manage. Also told him to try and find what damage had been done last night.

  Obtained two items of chicken feed from Major Sinclair — one about new plane trap formed by shooting wire from guns and the other about new pom-pom gun. Passed this on to Burton, who reported that they had seen 33 Spitfires, 3 Hurricanes, 2 Blenheims, one unidentified biplane, all marked YD, and all camouflaged and under cover at Northolt….

  As this Northolt news seemed rather a lot of good information, I consulted Major Sinclair, who said he thought I should ring up D of I (Air) and make sure it was all right to send this. I rang up flying officer Baring, and explained that Captain Robertson was away on leave and, in connection with the SNOW case, I wanted to know whether it was all right to pass on the above information which had been observed by our agent from the road.

  He consulted the D of I (Air) and returned to the phone to say that under no circumstances were we to send over information of this kind, and that if any changes in the original arrangements were contemplated, Captain Robertson or some other officer must go and see the D of I about it. I said I understood that the D of I had told Captain Robertson that anything any ordinarily intelligent person could see from the road was all right to send, but F/O Baring did not seem to think this was the case….4

  This information was sent anyway, and unmistakeably appears in the Hamburg-Berlin message file, except dated September 18 — nearly three weeks later. The obviously phony “wire trap” information, on the other hand, was forwarded the next day.

  In July, when McCarthy went to meet the Germans in Lisbon, he had been asked beforehand by wireless to bring along his national identity card, numbered KRIY 272-2, and his ration book, which happened to be of the pink traveller’s type. He was still in Lisbon when Hamburg wirelessed A-3504 for some “specimen names and numbers” for identity cards, which MI5 immediately supplied, having SNOW reply with twenty examples that included the names Wilson, Williams, Williamson, and Burton, the serial-number prefixes CNSO, PNAJ, and BFAB, and the suffixes 318-1, 141-1, and 141-2.5

  Some six weeks later, in the early-morning darkness of September 6, 1940, Gösta Caroli, a Swedish Nazi who had spied for the Germans in England before the war, landed by parachute in a field near Denton, Northamptonshire. At daylight he was discovered asleep by a farm worker who alerted the local constable. On being arrested, Caroli was found to have brought with him a transmitter, maps, £200 in banknotes, and an identity card with the serial number CNSO 141-1 — an obvious match to one of the serial numbers MI5 had provided.6

  During his interrogation, Caroli revealed that another parachute spy was to follow, and that they were to rendezvous at a certain pub in Nottingham. Sure enough, two weeks later a man with a Danish passport made out to “Wulf Schmidt” was picked up by police. He was
found to possess a British identity card in the name of Williams: PNAJ 272-3. Again the name, letters, and numbers were so close that it could not be coincidence. The connection to Owens was conclusively confirmed by the fact that both spies had on them slips of paper bearing Arthur Owens’s name and his current address.7 Six months earlier, Captain Robertson had berated Owens for not attracting other spies for him to arrest. Now he had two further prizes and the real Arthur Owens had not had to do a thing.

  Caroli and Schmidt were certain to be caught. In the weeks immediately before Caroli’s arrival, the Germans sent several messages asking Owens to suggest a suitable landing place for a parachute spy, with the promise of others to come in an operation the Germans referred to as Unternehmen Lena. The idea, as MI5 understood it, was that Operation Lena was about the Germans sowing a number of spies with wireless sets around England who would then report on British troop movements when the cross-Channel invasion was launched.8 It was plausible, especially as the RAF had been watching the steady concentration of small craft in the harbours of northern France for much of the summer.

  These exchanges with Hamburg seemed to be convincingly backed up by Abwehr wireless traffic intercepted by the Radio Security Service. The Hamburg station was also discovered to be in contact with several outstations (Cherbourg, Brussels, Paris) sending in simple ciphers similar to what the spy ship Theseus had been using. Rather than give the traffic to the Government Code & Cipher School, Major Gill and Lieutenant Trevor-Roper again broke the messages themselves. To their great joy, they found they were able to eavesdrop on Abwehr discussions about the Lena operation well before the agents were dispatched. MI5, indeed, gave Schmidt the code name TATE even before he arrived in England.9

  Administrative confusion at MI5 was at its height when these parachute landings occurred. Otherwise, it would have surely occurred to someone that the enemy secret service branches in northern France and Belgium would be unlikely to communicate with each other and Hamburg by wireless when landline teletype was readily available. Indeed, the Abwehr officers could have more easily and securely discussed their Lena plans by simply picking up the telephone and talking in simple code.

  The MI5 officers involved would also have been well-advised to consult someone with some basic military knowledge. They would have been told mid-September was too close to winter for Hitler to be contemplating conquering England. As a matter of fact, Hitler put the invasion off indefinitely on September 14; Schmidt didn’t land until September 19.10

  Colonel “Tin Eye” Stephens — so-named for the monocle he always wore — led the interrogations of Caroli and Schmidt. He was a forty-year-old former India Army officer with no police or investigative experience, who just two months earlier had been named to head up an MI5 interrogation centre that had been set up in a nineteenth-century mansion and former First World War hospital, Latchmere House, located in south London. They were his first prisoners of any consequence, and he was later to call them “the most spectacular wartime successes of the British counter-espionage service.” Both men agreed to change sides. Caroli becoming the double agent SUMMER and Schmidt the double agent TATE.

  All shadow of doubt about Owens still lingering in MI5 minds over the North Sea fiasco fell away, and the bomb-damage and ship-sighting reports of A-3504 (Owens/ SNOW) covering Britain’s major ports multiplied, supplemented by observations turned in by A-3527 (Eschborn/ CHARLIE) and A-3554 (McCarthy/BISCUIT). Robertson’s modest wireless double-agent operation had gone from one transmitter sending for one double agent to three sending for five.11 This was certain to impress the government heavyweights then eyeing MI5 with sharpened knives.

  It all made it very easy for Major Ritter, and he must have been very happy. The identity card scam had buttressed British confidence in Owens and given Ritter two more wireless agents in England whom he knew would be under British control. His adversaries had apparently also accepted in principle the idea that Ast Hamburg, and other Abwehr centres, would chat about their spies by wireless rather than landline, and in ciphers that any novice could break. He must have been pleasantly surprised when the transmitters of Caroli and Schmidt, A-3719 and A-3725, both came on air. The prospect of planting more triple agents on the gullible British was very bright.

  By the middle of October, Caroli and Schmidt were in contact with Hamburg. Both men were competent telegraph-key operators and so sent their own messages — Caroli from various places north of London, as though he was a spy on the move; Schmidt always from Barnet, a town northeast of London where the Radio Security Service and MI5’s Wireless Branch, presumably with Robertson, had moved to the month before. On November 1, they transmitted their first simultaneous weather observations taken at 5:00 p.m., Caroli’s, from near Cambridge, included barometric pressure. On being received by Hamburg, they were forwarded directly to the Luftwaffe’s weather service.12

  MI5 contributed enormously to the German pilots’ margin of safety that autumn of 1940 and over the winter. The daily weather reports it sent through SNOW, SUMMER, and TATE always included current conditions, estimates of visibility, cloud cover, and cloud height, and, starting in November, barometric pressure, the latter being a great help to the Luftwaffe’s weather service in compiling forecasts.13 Even a half-day warning as to where it was to be rainy or clear was hugely useful to Luftwaffe planners scheduling what cities to attack, and comforting to nervous U-boat commanders contemplating the dangerous dash across the Bay of Biscay.

  Certainly, the Luftwaffe was the best served. In listing the factories and infrastructure damaged and destroyed in the notorious Coventry raid of November 14, A-3504-Owens concluded that monthly production of Spitfires and Hurricanes had been almost cut in half. This could only have been encouragement for Göring’s bomber crews, who understood they were supposed to be targeting Britain’s war industries rather than randomly bombing.14

  The British chiefs of staff did not know of these goings-on. They had been asked in September whether they wanted to be closely informed of deception schemes and they said no. It was then left to the director of Air Intelligence, Commodore Boyle, to advise on the offerings of BISCUIT, CHARLIE, SNOW, SUMMER, and TATE.15 It appears from available MI5 files that neither the current chief of the air staff, Lord Newell, nor his successor, Lord Portal, knew that the Luftwaffe was being given up-to-date weather information. As the Blitz intensified that autumn and winter, the three wireless double agents continued to transmit their observations once or sometimes twice a day.

  Captain Robertson and his Wireless Branch boss, Frost, were not supplying this precious intelligence completely on their own. With Kell and his deputy, Holt-Wilson, gone, and with Brigadier Jasper Harker desperately trying to contend with the oars Lord Swinton kept inserting into things, the soft-spoken, former Scotland Yard man, Guy Liddell, was in effect running the show. As solo head of B Division — Mr. Crocker having quit in September — everything pertaining to MI5’s double agents theoretically came under his scrutiny, including their weather reports. These he described in his diary as accurate “though limited.”16 Given the detail that was actually in them, especially barometric pressure, it is hard to see what more the Germans could have wanted.

  Liddell is of particular interest at this time for another reason.

  MI5, it will be recalled, had spent the lion’s share of its effort during the 1920s and ’30s in counter-subversion work against suspected communists and left-wingers, a legacy of the Bolshevik scare that had gripped Britain’s Establishment during the First World War. This had involved intercepting mail and telephone calls, running informers, tailing suspects, and, most important of all, keeping track of people “of interest.” This was the task of the Central Registry, the MI5/MI6 secret archive consisting of a card index of names running into the hundreds of thousands backed up by PFs — personal files on individuals — in the tens of thousands. The Central Registry was the main memory of both secret services, but was administered by MI5 and housed in 1940 along with the res
t of the Security Service in the former nineteenth-century prison of Wormwood Scrubs.17

  At the beginning of the Blitz, during the night of September 29, the Registry was swept by flames, apparently hit by a German oil bomb, an incendiary that splashed inflammable fluid when it hit. How it penetrated the roof of Wormwood Scrubs is unknown. No MI5 files have been released that deal with the incident.18

  Liddell mentions the air attack in his diary:

  I dined with Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess at the Reform Club. Just as I was going away at 11:30 p.m. a Molotov breadbasket descended. Three incendiary bombs fell just inside Pall Mall and all sorts of people were rushing about in dressing gowns with bags of sand. When I got into the Mall the whole of St. James Park was lit up as by Roman candles.19

  The next day’s diary entry reads: “When I arrived at the office this morning I found that part of the Registry had been burnt by incendiary bombs and that the card index had been destroyed. Mercifully, we had had it photographed. Some thousand files had also been destroyed.”20

  Anthony Blunt, with whom Liddell dined that evening, was then a thirty-three-year-old Cambridge graduate and art historian who, after the war, was painfully discovered to have been working as a penetration agent for the Soviets. He and Burgess were members of the notorious “Cambridge Five,” Englishmen of privilege who were exposed in the 1950s and sixties as having fed the West’s most precious secrets to Stalin. The others in the group were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and a fifth whose identity is still disputed. Together with Blunt and Burgess, they penetrated MI6, MI5, the Foreign Office, and the Government Code & Cipher School. Their take during the Cold War included secrets pertaining to the atomic bomb and U.S.-U.K. counter-intelligence moves against the Soviets. It was the twentieth century’s most spectacular espionage achievement.