Codeword Overlord

by Nigel West

  In October 1943, with the prospect of having to report on troop movements to England and North Africa, the FBI arranged for Meiler to recruit three sub-agents, all of them notionally of German background and sympathies. They were HOLST, supposedly a US Navy seaman (second class); HERMAN, a US Navy seaman (first class) working in the Philadelphia Navy Yard; and OTTO, a labourer in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This trio was intended to keep Meiler well-informed for his transmissions, which increased to twice a week, at lunchtime on Tuesdays and Fridays. To support his expanding network, Meiler demanded more money, and the Abwehr made various attempts to deliver it, on one occasion sending a courier carrying eight rare stamps, but he only reached Buenos Aires, where he failed to send them on in the mail to New York, and drank himself to death on the proceeds of their sale. Another source of funds was a Jewish refugee who passed on $3,000 he had received from a Frenchman in Spain, long known to be in the pay of the Abwehr. The Frenchman relieved the Germans of an estimated 80 million French francs during the war but was taken into custody by the French authorities.

  Despite Meiler’s alleged shortage of funds, the FBI continued to transmit on his behalf until 27 April 1945, but in the months before D-Day he was drawn into the FORTITUDE deception campaign by reporting, on 3 March 1944, that he had overheard a group of officers drinking in a Manhattan bar whom he identified from their insignia as personnel from the 55th Infantry Division. This unit, which was completely imaginary, was intended to be a FUSAG component and to promote the threat of an Allied attack on Norway.

  FUSAG, the acronym for the First United States Army Group, was an essential (but imaginary) formation absolutely vital to the FORTITUDE SOUTH narrative. A decrypt of 10 January 1944 had revealed that the enemy had discovered FUSAG, described as ‘a unit not previously established by traffic analysis’ through the interception of plain language messages. Allegedly FUSAG was ‘last established on 1 November in the United States’. Later, on 12 March and 29 April, two further FHW appreciations were intercepted that reported General Patton’s arrival in England, associating him with the command of FUSAG.

  On 17 March 1944, Meiler gave an account of a conversation with a friend recently back from Kansas who had seen B-29 bomber crews wearing European campaign medals. Then, on 26 May, as part of an effort to mislead the enemy about the date set for D-Day, Meiler claimed to have visited Detroit, allegedly in the grip of a strike of 3.000 workers at a plant manufacturing landing craft. He also reported on encounters with troops ‘on embarkation leave’ who had mentioned that they were required to report back to their camps by 1 June, and on 30 May asserted that he had met some British merchant seamen who had talked indiscreetly about the French liner SS Ile de France, then employed as a transatlantic troopship, which was lying idle in Brooklyn.

  After D-Day, Meiler’s messages continued to peddle FORTITUDE’s narrative of a second wave, reporting that he had seen the insignia of the 104th Infantry Division in New York, an authentic formation that sailed for England on 27 August and was later committed to Normandy on 7 September.

  By the end of hostilities the FBI had transmitted 115 messages for PAT J, but two problems arose. Firstly, Ahlrichs claimed in his CSDIC interviews that the Abwehr always knew that Meiler was under the FBI’s control, and secondly, evidence from the Abwehr’s own records suggested that Hamburg-Wohldorf had successfully received a total of 213 signals from PAT J, which inferred that Meiler had gained access to a separate transmitter unknown to his FBI handlers, had employed an entirely different cipher, and apparently had used undetected couriers aboard neutral ships calling in at Spain and Portugal. The numbering system adopted by the Abwehr provided strong evidence that there was other, parallel traffic because, in March 1944 the sequence of messages 62, 63 and 64, did not match the FBI’s records. According to post-war research, Meiler’s illicit transmitter had been based in Rochester, New York, and was linked to an Abwehr station in Sigmaringen in Bavaria.

  During the period Meiler was operational, when the level of FBI surveillance had been quite limited, his handlers had registered their suspicion that he appeared to have more money than the deliberately restricted allowance they were paying him. Despite these doubts, the FBI continued to rely on him as the organisation’s principal ‘special means’ channel to the enemy, and omitted to mention the PAT J team’s scepticism to the JSC or MI5.

  Five examples of Meiler’s unauthorised messages survive, each commencing with the total number of letters in the following text, but none have ever been decrypted:

  237

  YBTAT MQFVO DVBIS PRITO KECQG KOKIK KYIWM ZUARJ

  ALYIA QTXVI VXZYA SZGOU SKIQN RBQJQ MOGEX EZDNF

  VUSDA ZUROP IXKLO CMNBL GRDHZ SWMCH KUPEF PZLEJ

  HBORD WKKHU VTHJK SFWDA JEPMU IZVIG KZLAU RDRXX

  MDECS SPOZV EEEOD DLMDZ NQMIA PIDWG XDCYY MVKSO

  HMMII IMPWQ NKIPA MLJVM SQSBB GLEVN SKTLQ TN.

  178

  EEKAO PARWO XIAVY PEJUX LHNJH PBQDD VDVXB MDIIA

  GWWMN ZBIVM ABUWS DWOUG DJOZL YLAUG LOAEA ILIHJ

  SWJFT OETAD TJISN AVAQN SODWB WZAXE ZVOXG XPGZV

  ADURM SHVXX XFMUQ PDPVQ DQWTU FRYOK XFVCP YDZWM

  OFWFL UZFNE QSSLO EVL.

  137

  TZIQB LQQXS KINOD MBVIL SUKMS SYARH MHZVP TVSWM

  AYDDG RIXYY OMFZM UGFZZ AZNQE LJUYI YGWUO QMDBI

  VCXGZ RMZNO PESSH GPOYX QQLEI XMAOJ BUUGZ CZFDL

  YZMKP GSMFM DTEZE OXMOS.

  140

  DMXKB KQNVH ZZEEK BEOOP YGCCA YVEPV TYKMT IYKFL ZKACV UXIYD KRUWY VNJVP XYEQP JPMFO ABZPT MJTDY ZVZKY BJGZE VDTYD ZEEJW ZUMJP IVSNA GSMZQ DLTXB QJQQJ FNPTA MQTED SKIJJ.

  229

  FPOXA TIJYP QRERQ ZNQST ZASNK ZARVQ HHSMW VLHFG PYHQC YUIRF FSGOI TWGDG SBPHC FKFZA BPEGH JZUJN WTSXP IJAMG TZDTO HXZDN UIVWW TIZOC AXKYE LHMDN SFZJO OMRHB ZPITH HKLSF ANVDR YNHQK SYRGI LTXOS WABOM DZWLB BYAVA SJOMN QQSZS ADDDU GREAO ALHON LXZGI IWPNF UZGUI JGMYA KSQFW ZSJL.

  MI5’s dossier on the Meiler family, categorised as fanatically pro-German, dated back to 1918 when Alfred’s brother Max had been put on an arrest list as a prominent German agent based in Scheveningen, ostensibly employed by Siemens. The French Deuxieme Bureau also accumulated a large file on the family, but no other action was taken until Meiler turned up in Madrid in February 1942. He subsequently claimed to have worked as a double agent in the Allied cause during the First World War, although MI5’s John Gwyer could not find any supporting evidence when he investigated the matter in December 1942. Gwyer also reported that, through some clerical oversight, Meiler’s dubious antecedents had not been passed on to the Americans. Worse, B1(a)’s Peter Ramsbotham raised the possibility that Meiler had been sent to the United States on a mission to penetrate American intelligence.

  The key to the mystery surrounding Meiler was probably held by his Paris handler, Udo von Bonin, who was arrested in Copenhagen in July 1945 and later transferred to a prison in Oslo. As soon as MI5 learned of von Bonin’s detention, the FBI liaison officer in London, John Cimperman, was alerted. Von Bonin had become a senior Abwehr officer, having been appointed to head Eins Marine in Angers in 1942, and then Oslo in 1943. Under interrogation, von Bonin explained his naval career, which included a posting to the Kondor Legion in November 1937 to liaise with his Spanish counterparts, his transfer to France, and then to Norway. However, although he appeared candid, his Danish and Norwegian interrogators were not indoctrinated into either ISOS or the double cross programme, and could not press him on his knowledge of Meiler. Nor could they pursue the delicate matter of German interest in American physicists. Instead, they took an interest in two spies delivered to Scotland, JACK and ERIK, completely unaware that the pair were the B1(a) double agents MUTT and JEFF.5 The consequence, of course, was that the many issues surrounding PAT J would remain unresolved.

  When Heinrich Ahlrichs was asked about Meiler, he said that he had been a pre-war friend of von Bonin’s, and had been code-named KÖHLER. He added that he ‘cannot imagine that any Jew would risk his life for Germany’
and especially ‘a Germany that had been written off by the whole world’.

  He believed that Meiler, who was to have built his own WT set, had been used in ‘a good FBI Spiel’: there was always ‘something typical in the way that questions were framed when a German agent was under the control of the British Intelligence Service or the FBI’.

  Ahlrichs recalled that he had been Meiler’s I-M controller for a period in 1944 and said that his ‘few and far between’ messages had included reports on ‘divisional flashes observed in New York’. However, ‘most of his messages concerned his urgent need for money’, which had been supplied through Berlin. Eventually Ahlrichs, who ‘was not impressed by his work’, had handed the case back to his colleague Kapitän Hübner, who had also received his messages via another radio receiving station, at Domane. Finally, at the end of the war, Ahlrichs had destroyed all his records relating to Meiler, so the truth would never be known.

  5

  THE IBERIAN FRONT LINE

  ‘After the fall of France the Iberian

  peninsula provided a favourable environment for covert

  operations by the Axis powers.’

  British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 4

  The intelligence front line, in terms of the recruitment, training and management of agents, was divided among the Abwehrstellen in Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Marseilles and Lisbon. These cities may not appear to be the most obvious from which to launch espionage missions against the British Isles, but in the circumstances of 1944, with much of western Europe under Axis occupation, the exit routes to Allied territory were somewhat restricted. Also limited was the category of individuals likely to receive permission to travel to Great Britain or the United States, so the Abwehr concentrated on the infiltration of agents posing as refugees, and the cultivation of merchant seamen who could visit Allied ports and make useful observations during their voyages. Furthermore, the Spanish regime was particularly beholden to the Nazis for aid received during the recent Civil War.

  As D-Day approached, Iberia grew in importance because of MI5’s stated fear that the Germans might try to overwhelm its security arrangements by sending what was termed ‘a large influx’ of spies, some of which might escape detection. The stakes were high because SHAEF had predicted ‘certain defeat’ if OVERLORD was compromised at any time up to forty-eight hours before the assault.

  At the outbreak of war the Abwehr was significantly disadvantaged by a ban preventing it from establishing any networks in England, a prohibition imposed following an embarrassing case in March 1936 when an Abwehr spy, Hermann Goetz, had been caught and imprisoned, prompting a political decision in Berlin not to risk any further provocations. The restriction had meant a last-minute scramble to establish a spy ring, and this had led to reliance on a group of Welsh nationalists who, unknown to their German controllers in Hamburg, were actually operating under MI5’s sponsorship.

  Headed by an embittered battery manufacturer, Arthur Owens, code-named JOHNNY, his organisation’s membership was partly notional, and partly MI5 nominees, and provided the Abwehr with a very flawed foundation with which to support additional agents delivered by parachute. By the end of 1940 the Security Service began to suspect that all the Abwehr’s assets in England were under its direct supervision, either imprisoned or working under control, and elaborate arrangements were made to keep these double agents viable by developing a system of supplying them with plausible information. Most double agent operations fail through the understandable reluctance of the security authorities to provide an enemy with authentic material to peddle to their masters, but MI5’s sophisticated solution was to indoctrinate all the armed services, at a senior level, into the principles of what became known as ‘special means’. With this high-level approval, MI5 could sustain an expanding stable of captured spies, willing volunteers and enthusiastic mercenaries to such an extent that it effectively came to manipulate all the secret messages transmitted to their Abwehr handlers, either in the mail or by radio.

  From January 1941 the double agents in touch with the enemy were directed by case officers answerable to an inter-departmental group, known as the Twenty (or XX) Committee, which met weekly to approve disclosures and conform to the requirements set by military and political policy-makers. By developing an ostensibly reliable flow of authentic intelligence, MI5 reduced the Abwehr’s need to send over more spies, and gradually came to realise that as well as satisfying the enemy’s thirst for information, it had gained the opportunity to actively engage in strategic deception of the kind so successfully pioneered in the Middle East by CHEESE.

  While MI5 became increasingly confident that it had a tight grip on the German spies in England, the security authorities faced a constant challenge from individuals purporting to be refugees who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe to Spain and Portugal where they underwent a preliminary screening before being allowed to continue their journey, either by air or sea, or overland to Gibraltar.

  The German espionage apparatus across Spain was enormous, and centred in the embassy, which was staffed by some 220 professional intelligence personnel, amounting to rather more than half the total embassy and consular contingent. In September 1944 the British Foreign Office submitted a list of 149 identified German intelligence personnel in a protest to the Spanish government, which, reluctantly, expelled eighty-two of them. Previously, under the advice of the ambassador, Sir Sam Hoare, no such demarches had been delivered by the British for fear of antagonising the Franco regime and maybe jeopardising the embassy’s main objective, which was to keep Spain out of the Axis.

  After the outbreak of war, the Madrid Abwehrstelle, which hitherto had dealt mainly with issues of Spanish liaison, acquired a parallel Kriegsorganisation (KO) which was directed primarily against the Allies, and later in the conflict the KO would subsume the original Stelle. The KO, accommodated at 4 Castellana, was supported by a fleet of fifty cars, a photographic laboratory and the communications branch, headed by Walter Loebe. The latter consisted of four American-manufactured 80-watt Hallicrafters and one 250-watt National radio transmitter manned by a similar number of women telegraphers, assisted by a further twenty-five operators and clerks. The KO’s communications station maintained numerous radio nets around the clock, with many call signs, but referred to itself as CENTRO. The headquarters in Madrid were in twice-weekly radio contact with representatives in Alicante, Algeciras, Cartagena, San Sebastian, Bilbao, Vigo, Huelva, Seville, Barcelona, Malaga, Tenerife and Almeria, where an estimated 1,500 informants were active in the Abwehr’s cause. Altogether, at the height of its activities, the KO received reports from some thirty sub-stations, known as Nests. Meanwhile, the embassy was in daily radio contact with Berlin for urgent messages, but sent all other material via the diplomatic pouch carried by a trusted courier.

  The Madrid KO’s role as a major communications hub would prove extremely important during the planning for D-Day because the hand cipher channels, from the consulates, were routinely read by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, and the machine cipher link to Berlin was also compromised, creating the sources code-named ISOS and ISK. A large SIS organisation of signals intelligence analysts based at Lord Verulam’s country estate outside St Albans in Hertfordshire, designated Section V, studied this voluminous traffic and, having translated the messages, the Iberian sub-section, known as V(d), sought to identify the personalities, operations and events described therein. Similar work was undertaken by five other geographical sub-sections, but the Iberian unit was by far the most productive because of the special status and size of the Lisbon and Madrid KOs.

  Because responsibility for managing agents remained with the original Abstellen, instead of transferring to the KO or being directed centrally from Berlin, a single agent could generate a large quantity of internal communications, which offered ‘depth’ to the SIS analysts, who created a gigantic card index to record the movement of, and references to, individuals whose true identity, though protected b
y cryptonyms and code numbers, could often be ascertained through the study of collateral information. Additional research, when necessary, was conducted by specially indoctrinated Section V officers attached to the local SIS stations in Madrid, Lisbon and Gibraltar.

  Whereas the KOs could rely on assistance from the local Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Italian and Vichy French diplomatic communities, SIS was very isolated and could not even depend on the Poles, Czechs or Free French because of hostile penetration. The SIS station in Lisbon, masquerading as the Passport Control Office in the rua da Emenda, consisted of the station commander (successively Ralph Jarvis, Cecil Gledhill, then Philip Johns) and a small Section V staff of Rita Winsor, Gene Risso-Gill and, from August 1943 to November 1944, Charles de Salis, with occasional help from MI9 (Michael Creswell) and SOE (Jack Beevor). When required, additional personnel would fly out from London to undertake particular assignments, among them Jack Ivens, Frank Foley and MI5’s Ian Wilson and Klop Ustinov. This policy avoided the need to maintain a large, locally based staff that inevitably would become a target for the ubiquitous enemy and a confrontational Portuguese secret police, the PVDE. In January 1942 SIS experienced a highly professional entrapment when a break-in at the office of the local Krupp representative, Kuno Weltzein, went disastrously wrong and the burglars were ambushed and arrested by PVDE officers who were acting in concert with Abwehr IIIF. The incident caused great embarrassment and served to illustrate the close links between the PVDE and the Germans.

  In Madrid, SIS’s position was even more precarious because of the ambassador’s animosity towards it. Hoare had served in Russia for SIS during the First World War and was very determined that his vital diplomatic mission should not be undermined by any embarrassing antics. Accordingly, almost as soon as he took up his post he sent home the pre-war Passport Control Officer (PCO), Colonel Edward de Renzy-Martin, and imposed severe restrictions on the station, which consisted of the station commander (Leonard Hamilton Stokes, then MI5’s Richmond Stopford), a single Section V officer (Kenneth Benton, later succeeded by Jack Ivens) and MI5 officer Walter Wren as the replacement PCO. Under normal conditions, in the event of difficulties with an ambassador, the Foreign Office would have exercised some discreet influence to restore a more regular working relationship, but as a former Cabinet minister Hoare could not be overruled and was impervious to the blandishments that might have been made by the SIS Chief Stewart Menzies and his very obliging opposite number in King Charles Street, Peter Loxley. Accordingly, the Abbottabad-born de Renzy-Martin, a much-decorated First World War veteran who had served with the Yorkshire Light Infantry and had retired from commanding the 1st Gurkha Rifles in 1933 to join the staff of King Zog of Albania, was discarded and his successor hamstrung. With a responsibility for developing a stay-behind organisation in case of a Nazi invasion, and a large Basque network to maintain so as to keep routes across the Pyrenees open, the SIS station was severely restricted and reluctantly came to rely on the over-enthusiastic naval attaché, Alan Hillgarth, a pre-war novelist who also represented SOE until the arrival of David Babington-Smith in February 1941. Hillgarth was assisted by Lieutenant-Commander Don Gomez-Beare, a Gibraltarian-born naval officer. Hopelessly outnumbered by the Axis, undermined by the ambassador and the subject of constant harassment by the Spanish authorities, SIS would be obliged to open a station in Gibraltar, and let John Codrington, an experienced member of the pre-war Z Organisation, take responsibility for managing SIS operations in the southern half of the country, and then be forced to ask for MI5’s help.