Codeword Overlord

by Nigel West

  Realising the possibility of an invasion in the West, Germany will aim at having a strength in field formations of some forty-five divisions, of which some thirteen may be offensive. On D-1 day opposition to OVERLORD is likely to consist of one to two defensive divisions, reinforced later on the same day by two offensive divisions. In addition there will be personnel amounting the static coastal and anti-aircraft artillery. Making no allowances for the delays imposed by allied interference or patriot activities, this opposition may be reinforced by a further seven or eight divisions by D+7. Reinforcement from outside France after the assault is unlikely to exceed some ten divisions drawn as necessary from Norway, Italy, Balkans and Central Europe, and also some five divisions from the Russian Front if the situation there is not too desperate. In the air, Germany might make immediately available a force of some 1,350 aircraft which might be reinforced by D+1 by some further 300 aircraft. German naval forces are likely to consist of some fifteen destroyers and torpedo boats and a fleet of E-boats and mine-laying craft. In addition, a number of small submarines may be detailed for channel operations. The reinforcement by service forces after OVERLORD is likely to be restricted to a few destroyers, torpedo-boats, minesweepers and other light craft. Ocean-going U-boats may give some assistance.

  Thus, from the earliest stages, MI5 was involved not only in the dissemination of information to the enemy through ‘special means’ about the impending attack, but was also responsible for ensuring the tightest security. The first major investigation concerning a high-level leak of OVERLORD plans occurred on 21 February 1944, as Liddell recorded:

  Roger tells me that the Transport Workers Union have blotted their copybook. At a general meeting they discussed the allocation of labour for certain secret tasks to be carried out on the south coast including PHOENIX. This appeared in the minutes, a copy of which they sent to the branch of the union in Dublin. Mercifully, this copy was intercepted by Censorship. The matter has been taken up with the Home Secretary and it is suggested that Edward Cussen should investigate to find out what further distribution has been given to the document.

  The prefabricated PHOENIX concrete caissons were components of the three MULBERRY harbours that were to be towed across the Channel to create the dock facilities and connecting causeways off Omaha and Gold beaches. In the absence of a captured French port, the resupply of the Allied bridgehead would be almost wholly dependent on the innovative artificial piers to offload the vital logistical support. The entire concept was a triumph of the most imaginative civil engineering, and the huge blocks were put in place, anchored to cope with the tidal movements, and protected by a breakwater of sunken ships that stretched for over 5 miles. Secrecy surrounded the construction in Weymouth and Southampton of the 400 caissons, which weighed up to 6,000 tons, and were hidden underwater off Dungeness until surfaced for their deployment. All information relating to PHOENIX was tightly held because the merest whisper of their true purpose might alert the enemy to a beach assault.

  The incident mentioned by Liddell was considered so serious that it was referred to the prime minister on 7 March 1944, when the director-general of MI5, Sir David Petrie, described the episode:

  A Trades Union despatched to various addresses in the UK/Eire copies of the minutes of a committee meeting at which measures had been discussed for consolidating the production of PHOENIX and particulars given of this device. The single copy of this document which was addressed to Eire was intercepted in censorship. Arrangements have now been taken, devised by the Home Secretary and executed by an officer of MI5 to recover all the copies discreetly, and have now been carried into effect.

  Appalled by this news, Churchill demanded more information, which Petrie supplied to his private secretary Tom Bromley, on 20 March:

  The Trades Union official responsible for the issue of the minutes was interviewed in the presence of the chief official of the Union. The former, who is an official of many years standing, was in a state of great distress. He explained that his motive in raising the matter at the Committee Meeting had been to ensure that the work of PHOENIX should proceed as smoothly as possible from the labour standpoint. He made no attempt to excuse his error in allowing the minutes to go out with his remarks reported in detail. He undertook that he would never be guilty of such an error of judgment again.

  With the cooperation of the Trades Union officials concerned, the whole of the 265 copies of the minutes have been recovered and will be destroyed. The Union concerned has made arrangements to ensure an efficient check on all their correspondence in future, and Sir Walter Citrine is, at the request of the Home Secretary, drawing the attention of all Trades Unions to the need for the very greatest care being exercised in their correspondence.

  In these circumstances the taking of criminal proceedings against either the Union or the responsible official is considered inexpedient.

  No sooner had this security scare been resolved, and Churchill evidently satisfied with the outcome, than MI5 was called in to investigate another apparent breach. In April 1944 the respected military commentator Basil Liddell Hart published a highly provocative article in Picture Post. Although he never actually mentioned the words ‘strategic deception’, he came close in his advocacy of the avoidance of what he termed ‘the tendency, prevalent in all organised armies, to become slaves of the orthodox and the obvious in pursuing a well-ordered efficiency’.

  As for positive means to the unexpected, the prime need is distraction to the enemy’s power of concentration. A great help to this is to operate on a line that threatens alternative objectives, so keeping him uncertain of our aims. We should realise the outcome of any landing depends even more on forestalling the enemy’s mobile reserves than on capturing the beaches.

  Liddell Hart’s seemingly well-informed comments caused consternation and prompted adverse comment at SHAEF, so MI5’s liaison officer, Martin Furnival Jones, brought the matter to MI5’s attention. Furnival Jones reported that ‘the very highest authorities’ had been alarmed by how, through ‘informal interviews with various American officers, a British journalist was able to compile a startlingly accurate report on invasion plans’. Consequently, Edward Cussen of MI5’s SLB section arranged for the interception of the author’s mail and telephone to trace his sources.

  Although a widely respected military commentator who had been decorated in the First World War, Liddell Hart had expressed defeatist views in 1939 and had often asserted that it would be impossible to win a war against Germany. Despite being Jewish, his dubious circle of friends included the Duke of Bedford, thought to be a Nazi sympathiser, and the enigmatic Kenneth de Courcy, later the highly controversial editor of the mischievous Intelligence Digest. Although not suspected of espionage, Liddell Hart was considered a menace who might inadvertently assist the enemy.

  Cussen’s investigation identified correspondence with General Sir Frederick Pile, the commander of Anti-Aircraft Command, written on his official letterheading, who appeared to possess a detailed knowledge of the invasion plan and discussed the merits of General Montgomery’s role in the operation. One of the documents intercepted by MI5 proved to be sensitive, mentioning ‘the actual area where the landing in Normandy was to take place’ and named places that ‘were all within the NEPTUNE target area’. The matter was considered so delicate that the Attorney-General Sir Donald Somervell and the newly appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, were denied access to those specific details (for which both men ‘expressed relief’).1

  On 9 May 1944 Liddell Hart, who lived in Ambleside, Westmoreland, gave a lecture, at the invitation of the Chief Constable, to Special Branch detectives at the Lancashire Police headquarters in Preston about the security implications of the imminent ‘Second Front’ in which he mentioned a recent conversation with an MI5 officer about high-level leakages, and speculated about the manipulation of double agents:

  Supposing there is such a spy organization in this country and the British know of it,
they may see it to the advantage of the Allied cause. There may be an organisation known to the higher officials but it may not be made known to the lower officials. This policy may be better for our own purpose.

  On 19 June, writing in the Daily Mail, Liddell Hart observed that ‘in the course of surveying the progress to date, it can be seen how much we have profited from our ability to fox the enemy by exploiting alternative objectives and varying threats’.

  By August, MI5’s concerns about Liddell Hart had dissipated, and the investigation was terminated without fully establishing precisely the source of his information. However, the case surfaced again in February 1946 when an Abwehr agent handler, Heinrich Ahlrichs, alias Albers, was interrogated and shed new light on several previous investigations.2 Guy Liddell paid close attention to Ahlrichs, who pre-war had been a captain in the German merchant navy, and had served in the First World War on a U-boat attached to the Turkish fleet.

  An agent named José Bentes, alias Bernard, was mentioned. He had been a ship’s chandler in Antwerp. He reported from Lisbon. It was said that he was in touch with a former Portuguese ambassador in London and that some four days before D-Day Ahlrichs received from the agent a report giving the exact place and time of the proposed Allied landing in Normandy and the subsequent line of attack inland. As his source he quoted the British military attaché, who had apparently been talking out of turn and in his cups at the home of Gago Teixeira, the former Portuguese ambassador in London. Bentes’ information about the battle of Normandy was accurate but some suspicion attached to him as there appeared to be some resemblance to the writings of Basil Liddell Hart.

  This suggested that Liddell Hart, unwittingly, had been used as a source for the Abwehr, and Ahlrichs confirmed that he had ‘forwarded the message at once to Fremde Heer. Berlin’s reaction was disappointing but “typical”: reports which do not give complete details of the divisions concerned and their strength, have only a limited value.’

  In the following weeks and months Bentes kept up a running commentary on future Allied plans and moves in the military field, which, in certain details, proved uncannily accurate … there was always some doubt in Germany as to the authenticity of Bentes’ claimed source. Some time during the summer of 1944 Ast Hamburg obtained from Lisbon a copy of a book by Captain Liddell Hart in which the author had cited points on the Normandy coast most suitable for the landing of Allied airborne troops in any planned invasion of the Continent; they coincided for the most part with the spots chosen for the actual landing of paratroops. This caused some discussion in Hamburg as to whether Bentes might not have been quoting the British military attaché when in fact he was using a copy of Liddell Hart’s book. It was felt, however, that this could not account for the agent’s report on the exact time and place of the Normandy invasion.

  The allegation that the indiscretion of Britain’s military attaché in Lisbon, Brigadier A.R. Barter, had endangered D-Day, must have been regarded as incredible in London, for there is no evidence to show that the matter was ever investigated.

  Alhrichs also claimed that he had deduced COBWEB had been controlled by the British, and had reported this to his Abwehr Eins Marine superiors at Hamburg, named as Hermann Menzel and Erich Pheiffer, but they had dismissed his suspicions as ‘pessimistic’.

  The news about Abwehr suspicions concerning COBWEB was not entirely surprising, for his contributions to FORTITUDE NORTH, and in particular his reporting of a notional, locally garrisoned US Army formation, the 55th Infantry Division, had never been supported by false radio transmissions, on the grounds that the traffic would be too far away to be intercepted by any German stations.

  Perhaps more significantly, Alhrichs declared to his CSDIC interrogator that that the FBI’s star double agents, PAT J and RUDLOFF, had been detected by the Abwehr. This was alarming news, for although RUDLOFF had been based in Buenos Aires and had not been engaged in any issues of a strategic significance, PAT J had participated in the FORTITUDE deception campaign.

  The mechanism in the United States to sanction the disclosure of information to the enemy in support of a deception campaign was the Joint Security Control (JSC), created by US Army’s Chief of Staff General George Marshall in anticipation of the TORCH landings in November 1942. When JSC was created the FBI was not represented because the employment and manipulation of double agents had not yet been contemplated. However, when PAT J was directed by the Abwehr to report on American troop movements, the JSC acquired a Special Section, headed by Newman Smith, to undertake the unexpected role of liaising closely with the London Controlling Section deception planners. Formerly a banker from Alabama, Smith would become the link between LCS and the FBI special agents handling PAT J, really Alfred Meiler.3 However, as the FBI primarily was a law enforcement agency, with little counter-intelligence experience, the concept of strategic deception took second place to the employment of double agents as a means of counter-espionage, to entrap other spies, rather than the pursuit of any longer-term objective. In those circumstances very few of the FBI’s stable of double agents, apart from PAT J, were used for this purpose.

  Born in Nijmegen, Holland, Meiler was a Jew who had converted to Roman Catholicism and had run his own electrical supplies shop in Venlo as a cover for a long career in espionage. He was aged 51 when, in February 1942, accompanied by his wife Elizabeth, he approached the Netherlands consul in Madrid to declare his mission to the United States for the Germans. Meiler, using the alias Walter Kohler, was referred to the British Passport Control Officer at the embassy, and eventually the case was passed to the FBI. In his various statements Meiler acknowledged having been on the German payroll since the First World War, admitted having served a prison sentence for theft, and described his recent recruitment by the Abwehr’s Udo von Bonin, and the radio training he underwent in Paris at the Lutetia Hotel. His cover story, which was largely true, was that he was a genuine refugee who wished to join his wife’s family living in New York. He was handled by an Eins Marine officer in Paris, Thomas Hübner, but left unspoken was the role of Meiler’s two elder brothers who remained in Holland as hostages.

  The mention of Kapitän zur See Udo von Bonin struck a note of authenticity as he was a personality well-known to the FBI when he had been implicated in the 1938 investigation of the German spy Günther Rumrich. At the time von Bonin, an officer aboard the liner SS Europa, had escaped arrest in New York, and was later promoted to deputy head of the Abwehr’s Eins Marine in Berlin.4

  Meiler and his wife were granted a United States visa and sailed on a Portuguese ship, the SS Guine, for Florida in May 1942. During the voyage he attempted suicide with a drug overdose and was taken ashore by the US Coast Guard. After his recovery in hospital he was escorted in July by the FBI to New York and installed in the Hotel Mayflower in mid-town Manhattan where, code-named PAT J, he mailed a ‘safe-arrival’ letter to a cover address in San Sebastian, Spain. At the outset Meiler declared the cash he had been given by the Abwehr, and revealed that his treasured Dutch Bible actually contained his personal hand cipher, some micro-photographs containing instructions on how to construct his own transmitter, and a questionnaire detailing his mission, to cultivate certain scientists:

  American scientists are working on atom-smashing uranium. Stages of these requirements important for us. Names of professors are: Prof. Fermi, Pupin Physics Laboratory, Columbia University, New York City is an Italian emigrant. Prof. Debye, Dutch emigrant, formerly director of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Berlin, address unknown, probably New York. However Prof. Lawrence, address unknown. KOEHLER should make contacts very carefully through a third person whenever possible without mentioning the purpose for the time being. As soon as radio connections are established he will receive definite instructions and questions in this matter from here.

  FBI technicians followed the Abwehr’s scheme to build a radio, and Meiler was found a job in the diamond district. Although ostensibly at liberty, he was the subject of continuous physical and technica
l surveillance by the FBI. His first signal was transmitted to the Abwehr station at Hamburg-Wohldorf on 7 February 1943.

  At the time, the FBI had been celebrating the closure in June 1941 of a large German spy ring based in the United States that had been successfully penetrated by William Sebold, a naturalised American of German parentage who had been pressured into co-operating with the Abwehr. Some of the network’s communications were sent by couriers, but others had been transmitted by wireless from a clandestine station set up and manned by the FBI at a remote site outside Centerpoint, Long Island. PAT J provided the opportunity to repeat the exercise, and another station was established by Special Agent Donworth Johnson at Benson House, in Wading River, overlooking Long Island Sound, and Samuel O. Smith was given the task of imitating Meiler’s Morse transmitting style for his weekly reports.

  Meiler made excuses to avoid finding the physicists Enrico Fermi and Ernest Lawrence, and correctly stated that Debye was now unreachable at Cornell University in upstate New York. All three, of course, were fully engaged on the Manhattan Project, the supposedly super-secret Anglo-American atomic weapons development programme. The Abwehr seemed to accept these explanations and on 21 February gave him a new objective:

  At this time the landing intention of the Americans in Europe is important. We desire information as to the strength and time element together with the source of your information.

  Meiler responded to this directive by describing the deployment in July of one of his friend’s sons, with the 29th Infantry Division, to Iceland. Although the 29th Division was a genuine unit, it had been raised and trained at Fort Meade in Maryland and shipped to Glasgow for training in Devon in anticipation of landing at OMAHA Beach on D-Day. This item amounted to the FBI’s first contribution to FORTITUDE.