by John Bryden
The destruction at Bremen was done methodically. The agent number and subject matter of each file was recorded before being given to the flames. Thus, one can gather that spies who were German citizens or who took the oath of secrecy were guaranteed postwar anonymity. Important agents recruited in the occupied countries were also protected. A Captain Van der Vliet, for example, codenamed delphin, reported on England from March 1942 to January 1944. His reports were destroyed in August and one can appreciate why. The Allied landings in Normandy had been successful and Holland was about to be liberated. The Dutch authorities would naturally want to seek out for punishment those of their countrymen who had worked for the Germans. Allowing Captain Van der Vliet’s real name to slip by was an oversight.
Another Dutch spy was codenamed noll. The records that remain of him reveal only that he spoke Dutch and English fluently, that he was a recruiter of agents for England, and that he took the oath of secrecy on April 17, 1941. This latter item is significant. The German oath committed one to secrecy until death, so Eghman was undoubtedly an important spy. The date that he took it indicates he was active against England long after the capture of the Lena spies and well within the period during which the British claimed there were no genuine enemy agents at large in Britain. Documents destroyed for 1943–44 include those of agents in England numbered 2215, 2220, 2254, 2351, 2596, 2778, and 2866.20
And those were only the records obtained from Bremen. Any Abwehr office was entitled to send a spy anywhere if it happened upon a suitable person, coordination being managed by Berlin.
TATE subsequently reported to the Germans that he paid RAINBOW and mutt £500 each, leaving a balance of £19,000, a huge sum. He was then notionally employed as a farm hand, who had days off only on weekends, which gave him an excuse for not spending the rest of the money.21 This story is so feeble that it is hard to accept that it was put forward in earnest. Meanwhile, RAINBOW was sent instructions on a microdot — the first the British had seen — and received an elaborate questionnaire seeking bomb-target information. MI5 took all this to mean that German faith in B1A’s double agents was unshaken.
In November, there was renewed cause for uneasiness. MI6 sent over a report that said that between the time of snow’s arrival in Lisbon in February and celery’s arrival by ship a week later — when all the fuss with Owens started — an Abwehr official had boasted that on board the ship was “an agent whom the Germans regarded as a valuable means of planting false information on the British.” This could only be CELERY — Walter Dicketts — then posing as an unhappy former RAF intelligence officer prepared to go over to the Germans.22
It was a hard chestnut. Dicketts was a veteran of the First World War, and had been recommended by the director of Air Intelligence (Boyle) himself. He had been an MI5 officer for almost a year. Various people in B Division offered various theories. It seemed impossible that he could be actually working for the Germans. If he was, then he was a triple agent. And so on, and on.23
It was J.C. Masterman, the XX Committee chairman, who finally put an end to the debate. On November 26, fully eight months after the problem first arose, he prepared a 2,200-word review of the evidence and concluded that the many contradictions could never be resolved because the main witness, Arthur Owens, had all along been working for both sides:
In this regard it is important to remember that we are apt to think of a “double agent” in a way different to that in which the double agent regards himself. We think of a double agent as a man who, though supposed to be an agent of Power A by that power, is in fact working in the interests and under the direction of Power B. But in fact the agent, especially if he started before the war, is often trying to do work for both A and B, and to draw emoluments from both.
This seems to me probably true of snow. Perhaps he was 75 percent on our side, but I should need a lot of evidence to convince me that he has not played for both sides. It is always possible that he was paid money under another name and that this money waits for him in America. His later letters to lily give some warrant for this view, as does his desire to be sent to Canada. We must not exclude the possibility that the doctor [RANTZAU] regards him as a man who has been working at the same time for both sides and who could be bribed or frightened into doing his better work for the Germans.24
Painfully convoluted, it nevertheless was a remarkable admission. Even if Owens was working only 25 percent for the Germans, it meant that on all those unsupervised trips to the Continent in 1939–40 he could have been telling the Germans anything at all, including who else was a double agent. MI5’s “double-cross system” had been compromised from the beginning, and Masterman acknowledged it. Yet, in his famous book The Double-Cross System (1972), he reversed himself and portrayed Owens as working only for the British.
It is not known how widely Masterman’s memo was circulated, but Guy Liddell certainly saw it. The subsequent actions — or lack of them — must be seen as his decisions.
First, the slippery Dicketts was cleared of all suspicion and given a £200 honorarium for his good work. He hung around London for the next year and a half, then disappeared.
Second, Masterman actually recommended restarting the snow transmitter, which was perfectly possible in that Owens had never sent his own messages and so was not needed. On the other hand, were snow to remain shut down while the Germans understood him to be only off-air temporarily, then it would look as though he had been arrested. Liddell opted for shutting it down, which inevitably meant discontinuing CHARLIE (Eschborn) and biscuit (McCarthy). They were too closely tied to snow not to go.
Third, TRICYCLE, tate, rainbow, balloon, gelatine, mutt, and GW, and his Spanish sub-agents, peppermint and careless, were retained, even though the first six were linked to snow by Plan Midas. TATE (Wulf Schmidt) was additionally and fatally linked to snow because of the piece of paper with Arthur Owens’s name and address on it that was found on him when he was originally arrested.25
In other words, Liddell eliminated the network of double agents who plausibly could have been retained, while keeping those double agents, especially TATE and TRICYCLE (Popov), who the Germans had to know were under British control.
It is an interesting exercise in mental gymnastics to try to fathom Liddell’s logic. The Blitz had ended in May, when Hitler shifted the bulk of his air power to the east against the Soviets, so there was no need for Owens’s fictitious bomb-damage reports anymore. Evidently, Liddell had read Popov’s questionnaire, however, and if he interpreted it as indicating possible war between Japan and the United States, he could have seen it as having momentous potential. There was then much speculation as to whether Japan would attack the Soviets from behind by invading Siberia, or go south against the British and Americans. Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire suggested maybe the latter.
Of course, it could simply be that Liddell did not want to have the embarrassment of telling the FBI that Popov was compromised.
When Wulf Schmidt fell ill in November and was hospitalized with a stomach ulcer, MI5 replaced him on the TATE transmitter with a substitute operator who was confident that he could imitate his sending “fist.” With Colonel Simpson long gone, and the Radio Security Service split off to MI6, there was no one in MI5 with the wireless expertise to protest this folly. Schmidt was an accomplished telegraphist, sending “clean and fast,” and he had been at it for a year.26 Anyone with signals training in the armed forces would have known the Germans would have had the routine capacity to spot even slight differences in the sending characteristics of their overseas spies. “Ronnie” Reed, however, the twenty-five-year-old former BBC technician was MI5’s only “expert.”
There was not the slightest chance of getting away with it. Ast Hamburg had grown into one of the most sophisticated wireless-spy centres in the Abwehr. Known as WOHLDORF, it operated from a large mansion on the outskirts of the city under the capable direction of Major Werner Trautmann, a German army signals officer who was up-to-date on the latest wir
eless technology. He had 120 enlisted men working round the clock listening for the messages of Abwehr agents in Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and the Western Hemisphere, each man assigned to just two spies, whose signals would become as familiar as their voices.
WOHLDORF also boasted a wireless training program for spies run by Richard Wein, who drilled his students on the telegraph key until they obtained a reasonable proficiency. The operators who were to listen for their calls sat in on these sessions. Wein himself trained Owens, and probably Schmidt.
There is simply no question that they would have detected someone was sending for Schmidt. Nevertheless, thirty-five years later Lieutenant-Commander Ewen Montagu was to write about Schmidt: “After some low-level reporting by wireless at the start of his career, he in fact became ill and a[n] MI5 wireless operator successfully imitated his transmission style. As this was not spotted by the Germans …”27 How Montagu, as a former intelligence officer, could have made that assumption is perplexing. A competent counter-intelligence opponent should be expected first to play along.
MI5 further threw caution to the wind in the case of Karl Richter, the parachute spy captured the previous May. As the weeks passed, the baleful “Tin-eye” Stephens at Camp 020 maintained the pressure, wringing out information from his prisoner bit by bit. Finally, Richter broke. He blurted out that he had not been sent to spy, but to check up on a wireless agent in England whose messages appeared to be under British control. This had to be Schmidt.28 It meant Richter’s failure to report to Germany because of his arrest had given TATE away in yet another way.
Ironically, Richter’s confession might have saved him, for technically his mission had not been one of espionage, but of counter-espionage. The matter was not raised at his trial, but on being convicted, Richter was advised to use it in his appeal. Liddell put MI5’s German specialist, Hinchley-Cooke, up to having a heart-to-heart talk with him in his cell. He was persuaded to withhold the argument from his appeal in favour of bringing it forward when he sought clemency from the Home Secretary. Richter adopted the strategy, the Home Secretary chose not to hear him, and he was hanged.29
Some of the women in MI5 were a little tearful; Richter was only twenty-nine, and a good-looking and brave young man. One of his interrogators made an eleventh-hour appeal on his behalf, arguing that reports of his execution in the daily papers and on the BBC would raise German suspicions about TATE even further. It did no good. The truth of Richter’s mission was “in no way relevant to the normal legal appeal,” Liddell wrote in his diary.30
Meanwhile, Charles Ellis arrived in London on November 3 for talks with the head of MI6(V), Valentine Vivian, and the following week discussed Popov over lunch with Major Robertson and Guy Liddell. The first two had definitely read the entire Pearl Harbor questionnaire, and with relations between Japan and the United States worsening, they surely would have speculated on the implied threat to the Pacific Fleet. Liddell’s diary does not mention them talking about it.31
The XX Committee was also debating at this time sending Montagu to Washington to set up a mini-XX Committee to handle any further questionnaires that might be generated by double agents operating from America. Liddell did not much like it, arguing to Colonel Vivian that Montagu was bound to meddle to the detriment of relations between British Security Coordination and the FBI.32 Montagu was sent out at the beginning of December anyway, arriving in New York on Saturday, December 6.
Montagu then met with Stephenson, the British Security Coordination chief, but it is not known what they talked about. Montagu learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor the next day, from a taxi driver who heard it on the radio and who discounted it as an Orson Welles–type hoax. Montagu knew better.33
As for Dusko Popov, he was en route from Rio when the ship’s loudspeaker called the passengers to the first-class lounge, where a grim-faced captain awaited them. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States was at war. More news was to come. At first Popov was overjoyed. He imagined that the Americans had given the Japanese a good thrashing, considering they had been forewarned.
Details of the disaster, in ugly snippets, came in during the day, rippling through the passengers like wind in a field of wheat: Two battleships gone. The Arizona blown up. The harbour in flames. The Pacific Fleet crippled.34
15
September–December 7, 1941
The Japanese attacked at dawn on December 7. Three hundred and fifty aircraft from six aircraft carriers had managed to get within 250 miles of Hawaii unnoticed. Pearl Harbor was taken by surprise, its radar installations improperly manned, its reconnaissance aircraft on the ground, and the ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet lined up on their moorings like sitting ducks. The score was eight battleships and ten smaller ships sunk or damaged, 188 American aircraft destroyed, mostly on the ground, and over two thousand servicemen and civilians killed or wounded. Japanese losses were trivial: twenty-nine aircraft and fewer than one hundred lives.
The American public was shocked. The newsreel footage of American ships in flames, of American soldiers and sailors running against a backdrop of billowing black smoke, and of Japanese aircraft criss-crossing the sky like hornets, was spectacular. America’s war had begun in fine style and there was no resisting when Roosevelt asked Congress to declare it. Yet, even as it did, many politicians were angry. How could this have happened? Pearl Harbor was supposed to be the bastion of U.S. naval might in the Pacific, and yet the Japanese had assaulted it easily and cheaply. The anti-war faction accused Roosevelt of somehow orchestrating the disaster in order to win public support for war. Over seventy years later, the issue of whether the Pearl Harbor debacle was by accident or design still has not been settled.
What makes it one of America’s most viral controversies is the evidence that came out after the war that suggested the top brass of the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy knew the Japanese were preparing for war and had their sights on Pearl Harbor. It was revealed that Japanese diplomatic ciphers had been broken on an unprecedented scale, enabling American codebreakers to track nearly every move by Japan toward war. Yet Pearl Harbor was never properly alerted.
Gross negligence was indicated and the secret army and navy inquiries done during the war were severely critical of General Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, and of Admiral Stark, the chief of naval operations.1 As soon as the war was over, a joint congressional committee was convened to get to the bottom of things, and in 1946 it lowered the finger of blame to the army and navy field commanders at Hawaii.
The navy commander, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, fought back. He argued that his only response to a possible air attack would have been to put the entire Pacific Fleet to sea, but he did not have fuel reserves or tankers to do that more than once, and if he had done so it could not have been for long. He therefore expected Washington to warn him if Pearl Harbor was seriously threatened.2 Instead, when relations between Japan and the United States were strained to the breaking point, he was led to believe by navy headquarters in Washington that the Japanese would strike first south, toward Thailand or the Philippines. Nor was he told when it was learned that the Japanese were studying the layout of the ships in Pearl Harbor, or alerted when it was known in Washington that Japan intended to break off relations on December 7, precisely when dawn was just breaking over Hawaii. General Walker C. Short, the army commander, described how army headquarters in Washington had led him to believe that the main danger he had to guard against was sabotage.
It did not matter. The highest authorities in the land had decided both men were to be scapegoats. They were dismissed, accused of dereliction of duty, convicted of errors in judgment, and banished into retirement at less than their proper ranks. In other words, with great cruelty, they were disgraced.
The many books and articles on the subject, some concluding massive mischance, others — the “revisionists” — favouring a Roosevelt-inspired conspiracy, have all tackled the issue through the evidence of the collected decrypts and the often conf
licting testimony of those involved. The incident of the TRICYCLE questionnaire has been given scant attention, always because it has been assumed that it began and ended with Hoover’s incompetence.
The likelihood that Roosevelt saw the Abwehr’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire during his Atlantic meeting with Churchill adds an intriguing new dimension to the controversy. Both leaders had been there with their senior military staffs, and although few details of the conference have ever emerged,3 certain actions these two men took immediately afterward take on new significance when that possibility is considered.
The first of these acts was to cut off the two Hawaii commanders, Kimmel and Short, from MAGIC, the Japanese diplomatic decrypts that up to that time they had been receiving. The result being that the men most directly responsible for guarding the Pacific Fleet were suddenly blindfolded.4
It can be fairly said that no other single action contributed more to the Pearl Harbor disaster. Had Admiral Kimmel and General Short continued to receive MAGIC, they would not have failed to see that the Pacific Fleet at its berth was a likely first target of the Japanese should war break out.
On October 9, nearly two months before the attack, others still on the MAGIC list received the following message sent from Tokyo to the Japanese consul, Nagao Kita, in Honolulu:
From: Tokyo (Toyoda)
To: Honolulu
September 24. 1941
J-19
Strictly Secret
Henceforth we would like you to make reports concerning vessels along the following lines insofar as possible.
1. The waters (of Pearl Harbor) are to be divided into five subareas…
Area A. Waters between Ford Island and the Arsenal.
Area B. Waters adjacent to the Island south and west of Ford Island.
