Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  8. PRO, KV2/448, Doc. 870c.

  9. Ritter, Deckname, 200–02; and 3504 messages Nos. 125 and 126 of 31 May, NARA, T77, 1540.

  10. Ritter, Deckname, 201–16, 242. Because France was just then collapsing and he had to be flown around the country to get to Portugal, his recollection was especially vivid. Meeting confirmed by CDIC interrogation of Julius Bockel, 20 Dec. 1945, PRO, KV2/1333. Also, Ritter originally wrote his memoir in English and extracts from it regarding the meeting with Owens, including the 12–17 Jun. dates, are to be found in Charles Wighton and Günther Peis, Hitler’s Spies and Saboteurs: Based on the German Secret Service Diary of General Lahousen (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 164–70. There is also the message “Friend left fifteenth” at Frame 0335 on Reel T-77/1540 (NARA). From the surrounding messages in this file, it appears that it was an Abwehr security practice not to give names, so this should be Owens. The message “Friend representative wines — Stay one week” of 9 Jun. should also be a reference to Owens, since McCarthy did not go to Portugal until July. There is some scissoring of the message at Frame 0327. Otherwise, there are no documents in the available MI5 “SNOW” files that allude to Owens going to Portugal that spring, although the broken numerical sequence indicates many are missing. It should be noted that the A-3504 weather reports were still being received because Owens’s notional wireless operator normally took the observations while he was off spying.

  11. Ritter, Deckname, 201–02, 211–15. Extracts from the English version of Ritter’s memoir, probably written when he was a prisoner of war can also be found in Wighton and Peis, Hitler’s Spies and Saboteurs, 166–71.

  12. NARA, T77, 1539. These messages as copied to Berlin are numbered 1522/40 and 1523/40 respectively “from 22 Juni 1940.” This is not the usual format, so it may be that they were prepared on that day but sent to Berlin by courier because of their importance. Because penetration agents were normally run by the Abwehr’s counter-espionage sections, Ritter would have had to say E-186 was attached to Abt IIIf.

  13. The information was also hot. Bomber Command moved to High Wycombe just that March. Stanmore was in the London Borough of Harrow, with Fighter Command housed in a eighteenth-century building, Bentley Priory. The preamble to one of the Stanmore messages begins with the following identification: “Quelle: engl. Ing. der R.A.F. Bekannter des E 186.” That is: “English engineer of the RAF. Contact of E-186.”

  14. NARA, T-77, 1540. A pencilled note in German directs that McCarthy be changed to “friend” in the typed copy. The “probably more than ten days” suggests that Owens was not any too anxious to make the trip again, or that MI5 did not want to run the risk a second time of him going and not coming back. (This interpretation of the traffic is based on the date the 3504 and E-186 reports were sent to Berlin.)

  15. Orphan page extracted from unknown file to MI5 file on Ritter circa Aug. 1940. PRO, KV2/85, Doc. 8Aa. See also, PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1433B, and the undated SNOW, BISCUIT, CHARLIE, CELERY, SUMMER” case summary which has McCarthy in Lisbon from 24 Jul. to 21 Aug.: PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1803a. Farago, Game of Foxes, 274, also has 24 Jul. Masterman, Double-Cross. 44, puts him in Lisbon in Apr. Liddell’s diary gives 20 Aug. for his return. He is conclusively identified as V-Mann 3554 reporting from Lisbon on 30 Jul. in NARA, T-77, 1569, and his reports for that week are found on Reel 1540. The second batch of E-186 messages are those in the group 1884-91/40 and noted as having been sent 29 Jul. 1940: NARA, T77, 1540. These appear to be replies to German queries.

  16. John Colville, Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), 200.

  17. PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1803a.

  18. “BISCUIT returned from Lisbon with an up-to-date wireless set in a suitcase and L950”: Liddell Diary, 20 Aug. 1940 (NWV). It seems incredible that Liddell accepted that the Germans thought an ordinary British citizen could get through Customs with such an item. For Poole to Lisbon and A-3554: U.S. Navy spy card index, NARA, T77, 1568-9 and actual messages on Reel 1540.

  19. Orphan page, undated, PRO, KV2/85, Doc. 8Aa. It appears not to belong in this file.

  20. NARA, T-77, Reel 1540. Unless Owens had a secret transmitter somewhere, this message must have been approved by Robertson.

  21. Robertson, Note to File, PRO, KV2/448, Doc. 900A. The messages are on NARA, T-77, 1540, under 3504 and 3554.

  22. Michael Korda, With Wings Like Eagles: The Untold Story of the Battle of Britain, Reprint (Harper Perennial, 2010), 197–98.

  23. At the time, the Nazi security service believed that Thames House housed MI5. Today it really is the home of MI5.

  24. Unsigned note, 27–28 Aug. 1940, PRO, KV2/448.

  1. Colville, Fringes of Power, 245.

  2. www.wandsworth.gov.uk/info/200064/local_history_and_heritage/122/wartime_voices/4.

  3. NARA, RG242, T-77, 1540. Note that the Luftwaffe was not yet bombing by night.

  4. Single page from what appears to have been a log book or diary, unattributed, 27–28 Aug. 1940, PRO, KV2/448. The messages regarding airplane “traps” (an idea which was obviously unsound) appears in the Hamburg–Berlin file the next day, whereas the information about the Spitfires, Hurricanes, et cetera at Northolt appears in a Hamburg–Berlin message of 18 Sep. 1940, by which time it was out of date. Major Sinclair was the officer actually in charge of double agents at this time: Curry, Security Service, 161. Note especially that this message indicates Robertson was allowing messages to be sent without authorization from higher authority. This contradicts Masterman’s assurance in The Double-Cross System that only approved messages were sent.

  5. 1942 SNOW case analysis (pages missing), PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1433B. SNOW sent several messages with the identity card information beginning with Spruch Nr. 174: NARA, T77, 1540. Note that one is also addressed to IG Berlin, the Abwehr division responsible for faking documents, copy to Abw I Luft/E in Berlin. Ritter is copied on another while at Ast Brussels. Wilson, Williams, and Burton were the surnames of MI5 officers, the last two then working directly on the SNOW case: PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1075a.

  6. PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1075a; and Stephens, Camp 020, 138–39.

  7. Schmidt was also carrying a ration card endorsed with McCarthy’s identity card number, KRIY 272-2: PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1433B. Had Schmidt been a genuine spy legitimately captured, this would have been an example of Ast Hamburg incompetence on a grand scale because it would have led police directly to A-3554. For both Caroli and Schmidt carrying Owens’s name and address: OSS file on Ast Hamburg, NARA, RG319, IRR XE010158, Box 6. Had the British officers involved read the pre-war espionage literature, which told how the Germans isolated their spies from each other, they would surely have thought these actions deliberate.

  8. Hinsley and Simkins, BISWW, IV, 321-27. Aunt Lena was the nickname of Helena Skrodzki, the secretary of Richard Protze, the Abwehr’s counter-intelligence chief in Holland-Belgium before the war: Farago, Game of Foxes, 101. Both were especially trusted by Canaris, and it was probably Protze that Ritter liaised with when running the Lena agents out of Belgium.

  9. White, PRO, KV4/170; and Liddell, Diary, 8 Sep. 1940. I was unable to find the Group 1 intercepts he refers to. They are not in HW19/1 which covers the period in question, presumably because HW19 comprises only ISOS decrypts done by Strachey at GC&CS. For Group 1 as Hamburg, see Bob King, “The RSS from 1939 to 1946,” www.zamboodle.demon.co.uk/rss_old/box25his.pdf; and Trevor-Roper, Sideways. The ciphers would have been the simple transposition type for Gill and Roper to break them.

  10. Two days after Caroli landed, OKW issued a directive postponing the invasion to 21 Sep., with the go-ahead order to come a minimum of ten days in advance. It was then postponed indefinitely on 14 Sep. See “12 Top Secret Directives” of OKW, U.K. Air Ministry translations, LAC, RG24 981.013(D29). This means both spies were dispatched when Canaris knew that the invasion order was unlikely to be given. See also TATE case summary, 15 Jun. 1942, PRO, KV2/61.

  11. PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1433b; and Cam
p 020, 137–40. Liddell’s version of Caroli’s landing differs in some details: Liddell Diary, 7 Sep. 1940. Over 90 percent of the content of Caroli’s MI5 file — at least three hundred documents — is missing. For the reports of A-3504, and, through him, A-3527 and A-3554, see NARA, T-77, 1540.

  12. L-502 Spruch-Nr.17 Ort in der Nahe Cambridge; Wettermeldung von L-503 aus London. For position of 3725 always Barnet, see Message 25, 15.5.41, NARA, T-77, Reel 1540. For Barnet and MI8(c), later Radio Security Service, see Curry, Security Service, 289. Lene 502 was Caroli; Lena 503 was Schmidt.

  13. SNOW began reporting barometric pressure beginning 13 Nov. 1940 and his messages were thereafter forwarded to the Luftgaukommando XI Wetterdienst: NARA, T-77, 1540. TATE supplied only cloud height and cover at this time, but took over supplying the Germans with barometric pressure when SNOW was dropped by MI5 in Apr. 1941. Ibid., 1541. SUMMER reported barometric pressure from start-up.

  14. Von 3504, 25.11.40, NARA, T-77, 1540. This extensive list of damaged and destroyed factories in Coventry is not to be confused with a similar list attributed to TATE and reproduced in Hinsley and Simkins, BISWW, IV, Appendix 8, 331–33. A-3504 was reporting on the famous big raid of 14 Nov. 1940; TATE about one that occurred on 8 Apr. 1941 (not 14 Jul.). The difference is that in the first bomb damage intelligence was released with the approval of no higher authority than Robertson or Boyle. In the second, approval was obtained from the Wireless Board and only after a rewrite demanded by Sir Finlater Stewart.

  15. For Boyle as the sole director of intelligence officer to vet the information being given the Germans, see, The W-Board, unsigned internal summary, not dated, PRO, KV4/70. See also, Liddell Diary, 10 Sep. 1940.

  16. Liddell Diary, 2 Feb. 1941. See also, 16 Sep. 1940. PRO. Masterman, Double-Cross System, 66. The non-wireless double agents were being run separately from Robertson’s wireless agents so it cannot be assumed that Dick White, Felix Cowgill, and Mr. Frost were aware that the weather was being sent, especially since the reports were being done out of Barnet.

  17. Curry, Security Service, 56, 77, 375–80. The MI6 “Registry” alluded to in Jeffery, MI6, 165, 327, and 626, was, prior to 1941, a small affair of no more than twenty staff. According to Curry, the “full carding” of its names was actually done by the MI5 Registry.

  18. For the 29 Sep. date of the fire, see Curry, Security Service, 176, and 378; and Andrew, Authorized History, 231. The latter states, without giving a source, that the Central Registry was particularly vulnerable because it was housed in the former prison laundry which was glass-roofed. This seems improbable, as the Registry was by far MI5’s most valuable asset and there were plenty of empty inmate cells to provide safe and secure storage. The glass roof explanation must be doubted until sourced.

  19. Liddell Diary, 24 Sep. 1940 PRO.

  20. Liddell Diary, 25 Sep. 1940 (Not in Nigel West Version). This is the wrong date. The statement, “Registry has now moved to Blenheim,” of 26 Sep. is also wrong. See Note 19 above.

  21. For the notoriety of the first three, and Philby in Vienna, see Phillip Knightly, Philby: KGB Master Spy (London: Andre Deutsch, 2003), 32–33, 46–47. Even if MI5 had not picked up on Philby’s activities in Vienna, there definitely would have been a file on him as a journalist, and even more especially so as the Spanish Civil War was seen as a struggle between fascism and communism. Files on journalists, especially those serving overseas, were routinely kept by the security and intelligence services of most advanced countries during this period, and probably still are today.

  22. Curry’s claim that the fire “… destroyed nearly all” of the files (Security Service, 176) is a lot stronger than the remark that it only “badly damaged” the Registry in Andrew, Authorized History, 231.

  23. This fact makes MI5/MI6 chief Dick White’s quoted explanation for how communists got into the secret services at the time ring hollow: “The feeling (was) that anyone who was against the Germans in the war was on the right side”: Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence (London: Grafton Books, 1986), 248. All the major Soviet penetration agents gained entry into British Intelligence when Stalin and Hitler were close (before Germany’s surprise invasion of Russia in Jun. 1941). That qualifies them as latent traitors then.

  24. Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001), 253; Andrew, Authorized History, 231, says (without attribution) the doors were locked.

  25. Curry, Security Service, 378.

  26. Before the fire, it was normal for an MI5 officer to check a newcomer’s background through the Registry: Montagu, Beyond Top Secret U, 48. Liddell himself acknowledged that “every communist must be regarded as an enemy agent”: Liddell Diary, 21 Mar. 1940.

  27. West and Tsarev, Crown Jewels, 138. Maurice Dobbs was a notorious Cambridge communist and agent-recruiter for the Soviets. There should have been quite a file on him, too.

  28. For confirmation that the names and dossiers of Burgess and Maclean were no longer in the Registry: “Blunt had been the only one of the Cambridge Five to attract the pre-war attention of the Security Service”: Andrew, Authorized History, 268. Obviously, this cannot be so. Recall also that Liddell’s diary has the date wrong for this incident (Note 20 above). The diary is in two-ring binders, so pages written later could have been inserted at any time.

  29. Knightly, Philby, 57, 181, citing David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 56. See also, Andrew, Authorized History, 267, n. 26; and Liddell Diary, Jan.–Feb. 1940.

  30. Andrew, Authorized History, 266.

  1. Lord (Earl) Jowitt, Some Were Spies (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954), 32–34. He was the prosecutor during their trials so he is an especially reliable source for these details.

  2. Gwyer to Robertson, 30 Sep. 1942, PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1497b. See also, PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1433B.

  3. Fritz Künkele, a pre-war specialist in “criminal chemistry,” described his job at I-G in Berlin, 1939–40, as a kind of quality control officer responsible for “[e]xamination and evaluation of counterfeited documents, e.g., exchange of passport photographs, exchange of pages in agents’ passports, additional counterfeit visas, and endorsements.” He was involved in managing the files that were maintained for the various seals, stamps, and signatures used on foreign documents, including foreign driving licences: Ayer to Director re Künkele, 12 Sep. 1945, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 184, 65-56228. MI5’s nearest equivalent was the secret-writing detection facility of Mr. S. W. Collins: Curry, Secret Service, 371. Collins was a relic of the First World War: Herbert Yardley, Secret Service in America, 1st British Edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), 28–42. For German First World War false document capacity: Nicolai, German Secret Service, 213.

  4. Ritter, Deckname, 216.

  5. PRO, KV2/14–16, 85.

  6. Jowitt, Some Were Spies, 18–31; and Stephens, Camp 020, passim. Major Sensburg, IH at Ast Brussels, became notorious in the Abwehr for sending untrained and unqualified agents to England and certain death: PRO, KV2/275.

  7. Liddell Diary, 8 Sep. 1940.

  8. “The officers of Abt I recruited their own agents from Regt 800, PW cages, convicts and from pro-Nazis in occupied territories”: USFET interrogation of Ast Brussels Leiter I Major Karl Krazer, 12 Jul. 1945; reprinted in John Mendelsohn, ed., Covert Warfare (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989).

  9. Interrogation Report on Andeas Folmer, TIC No. 865, 28 Jun. 1945, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 210, 65-56014.

  10. Gunter Peis, Mirror of Deception (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 138–39. Peis interviewed one of the unfortunate eight still in prison.

  11. Masterman, Double-Cross, 49.

  12. PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1433B. Others who were found to have documentation traceable to the information provided by SNOW were: Joseph Jacobs (landed 1 Jan. 1941); Helga Moe and Tor Glad (MUTT and JEFF, 7 Apr. 1941); and Karl Richter. See also, Masterman, Double-Cross, 53.

  13. Ayer to Director, Interrogation of Fritz Künkele, 12 Sep. 1945, NARA, RG
65, IWG Box 184, 65-56228. Künkele worked for Abw I/G in Berlin in the counterfeit documents section.

  14. Liddell seems to have suspected this, but did nothing about it. Liddell Diary, 2 Feb. 1941.

  15. Interrogation of Major Julius Böckel, CSDIC(WEA), 8 Nov. 1945, PRO, KV2/1333. See also, Interrogation of Dr. Friedrich Praetorius, Oct. 1945, 40, NARA, RG65, IWG Box 169, 65-56466-3.

  16. Richard Bassett, Hitler’s Spy Chief (London: Cassell, 2005), passim. Despite the misleading, this author presents convincing evidence of Canaris’s opposition to Hitler.

  17. A-1304 first began transmitting such commodity information in August. See his message on food prices and shortages: Hamburg to Berlin, 12 Aug. 1940, NARA, T-77, 1540.

  18. NARA, T-77, 1541, 1540. A 1939 Street Directory and a 1940 patent application by co-owner Frazer Nash place Nash and Thompson on Oakcroft Road, off Kingston bypass, midway between the intersections with the bypass of Hook Road and Ewell Road. The Abwehr may have already had this information but because these messages went directly to the Abw I Luft/E desk at Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, and the officer in charge was Major Friedrich Busch, a fervent Nazi, Canaris could not have prevented it from being passed on to the Luftwaffe.

  19. Christopher Shores and Hans Ring, Fighters over the Desert (London: Neville Spearman, 1969), 217–20, 255. This is an authoritative study of the air battles over the Western Desert from both sides. The authors do not give the losses for the Me 109s but it appears they were disproportionately less than those of their adversaries.

  20. U.S. Navy Advanced Base Weser River to British Army of the Rhine, 19 Jan. 1946, re captured German documents, PRO, KV3/207. The Americans borrowed the documents and microfilmed them. They are the core of the NARA, RG242, T77 collection. A search did not turn them up at the National Archives at Kew.