by Nigel West
Rubio, code-named BURMA, had lived in Gibraltar before the Civil War and run an olive oil business, Andalusian Industries Ltd, and a greengrocery in Irish Town. During the conflict he had registered as a refugee to escape the Republicans. Since then he had transformed his rented home at 128 Avenida de Espana in La Linea into an observation post equipped with telescopes to monitor movements on the Rock, and he used his position as a military intelligence officer stationed in Algeciras to protect German networks. The neighbouring property at 130 was occupied from December 1941 by an Abt. I agent, Manoel Marques Pacheco, who had previously acted as a German agent in Tangier. Born in Portugal and based in La Linea, Pacheco reported to Kuhlenthal in Madrid but also worked for the Italians and the Japanese. In January 1944, after British protests, he was deported to Lisbon and his organisation was taken over by Calixto Rodriguez, code-named READY. A Guardia Civil reservist employed by the Delegación de Fronteras in La Linea, and assisted by his wife Maris and their sons Pedro and Enrique, Rodriguez reported to the Abwehr in Malaga through Lucas Hernandez, and to Colonel Cores at the Spanish military headquarters in Algeciras.
Colonel Soto, based in Algeciras and formerly the director of the San Roque military academy, was a leading Falangist who took over Rubio’s organisation when the latter was transferred to Seville.
The KO established representatives, such as Gustav Kraus at the Villa Leon in the Avenida Faringdon, Algeciras; Hermann Lehmann in Marbella; and Max Schiefer, who operated under commercial cover as a wine merchant in Malaga, and they exchanged messages over a wireless link to Madrid. While the Germans supplied the funds and explosive materiel, and exercised some co-ordination over the timing of the operations, the Spanish, who had their own motives for undermining the British occupation of the fortress, pretended to adhere to a semblance of neutrality while actually taking a very aggressive posture.
Despite Gibraltar’s obvious strategic importance, the Axis enjoyed a relatively free hand in monitoring the dockyard until July 1941, when the authorities in London came to appreciate good security, especially when the besieged island of Malta was in urgent need of relief. When the convoy GM-1, code-named Operation SUBSTANCE, was ambushed by the Italian Regia Aeronautica, and suffered the loss of a destroyer, HMS Fearless, and damage to a cruiser, HMS Manchester, another destroyer, Firebreak, and the troopship Sydney Star, it was discovered from signals interception that the convoy had been compromised three days before it had even reached Gibraltar. When it had sailed on 21 July it had effectively entered a trap that was snapped shut by a lethal force of enemy bombers, torpedo boats and submarines. On 23 July 1941 Guy Liddell recorded the incident in his diary:
There has been a bad case of leakage regarding a special convoy which is proceeding direct to Malta. The result has been that one destroyer has been sunk, a cruiser torpedoed and one of the supply ships torpedoed. The cruiser has got back to Gibraltar and the rest of the convoy, including the damaged supply ship, is going on. It is clear from an Italian intercept that the approach of this convoy was known about on 16 July. Enquiry shows that the security arrangements for the assembly of the goods and the convoy were absolutely lamentable. Packing cases arrived labeled ‘Malta NAAFI’, telegraphed in an obvious code about the arrival of stores and the Crown Agents notified at least a hundred firms about goods required for Malta. There were, moreover, a number of ships in port while the loading was going on and a good many of them left for Eire and other destinations before the convoy.
Until this episode the DSO, Colonel Medlam, had taken a rather relaxed view of security on Gibraltar which had suffered only one major attack, on the night of 30 October 1940 when two manned torpedoes were deployed from the Italian submarine Sciré, resulting in the capture of two swimmers, Gino Birindelli and Damos Paccagnini, who had attempted to reach HMS Barham. When questioned, both men claimed improbably to be the survivors of a shipwreck, and were detained as prisoners of war.17
An explosion in the North Tunnel on 1 February 1941 was later claimed by Abt. II as a successful sabotage, but it was more likely an accident, and the DSO had good reason to be confident about the level of internal security because whenever his staff, or the GSP or the Field Security Sections, came to suspect an individual, he simply used the governor’s very wide and unchallenged authority to issue an exclusion order, which banned the person concerned from entering the territory. The draconian procedure was quick, effective and without any means of review or appeal, and could be withdrawn with equal speed, without any reasons given. As an instrument of prevention, it was unequalled, and the mere threat of removing a Spanish worker’s livelihood was itself useful leverage.
The first confirmed example of a German attack happened on 2 April 1941 when some RAF oxygen cylinders exploded in a fire caused by an incendiary device concealed in a workman’s mess tin smuggled into the North Camp seaplane base by Alfredo Dominguez. It was at this point that a Spanish Army reserve officer, Lieutenant Juan José Dominguez, approached a member of the GSP in La Linea and was introduced to the DSO, as MI5’s David Scherr recalled:
In September 1941, a young reserve lieutenant of the Spanish Army approached a friend of his in the Gibraltar Security Police and handed him some explosive material, saying that he had been asked to help in a sabotage organisation run under German direction by an engineer lieutenant named Pedro Moreno at Campamento. He had seen in the latter’s house a stock of infernal machines variously camouflaged as fountain pens, coffee pots, thermos flasks, oil tins etc., and had stolen one of these bombs. Although a supporter of the Nationalists during the Civil War, he was not pro-German, and wished to warn us.
The officer was invited into Gibraltar, and agreed to work for us as a XX agent. He was given the cover-name SUNDAE. He went back to Moreno and accepted a job in the latter’s organisation, and was told he would soon be sent to Seville to collect three mines for a projected sabotage scheme. In Seville he would contact Marcelino Pardo, the UFA representative there. The mines were manufactured at a German-owned estate near Jerez de la Frontera.
SUNDAE first went to Madrid, where he met an Abteilung II agent named Enrique Schumer of Calle Francisco Silvela 21, and then on to Seville for the mines. Pardo introduced him to another sabotage agent, Francisco Zimmerman, also interested in the Gibraltar area.
In October 1941, two mines which had been brought from Jerez were transferred from Algeciras to a house in Puente Mayorga, and Zimmerman, who had helped in the transfer, left for Madrid to make final arrangements for the sabotage attack in the Commercial Anchorage, which was to be carried out on his return to the Campo.
For reasons unknown to us, this attack never took place. The immediate reason was, however, simple enough: the two mines were removed by the DSO’s officer in charge of the SUNDAE case [David Thomson], hidden in a vegetable cart, and brought into Gibraltar clandestinely the next morning!
This bold coup had the unfortunate effect of throwing German suspicion upon SUNDAE, who did not in fact know of the ‘robbery’ and was thus able to clear himself fairly satisfactorily, though he was actually arrested by the Germans, and interrogated for several days before being released. In November, SUNDAE left for Germany, using as cover his official position in the Spanish national sports organisation, and accompanied by Schumer, and could not be contacted by us again until February 1942, when he reported that his new orders were to work in Northern Spain, probably in the Bilbao area, in co-operation with a certain Wolfgang Menem to whom he had been introduced in Stuttgart.
The Germans proposed, pending Menem’s arrival in Spain, to get SUNDAE to recruit a special crew for a cable-ship then in Bilbao, in order to carry out a sabotage operation which involved the cutting of the submarine cable between Bilbao and England.
SUNDAE disappeared from the Gibraltar district and was not heard of again until on 25 July 1942 he took a prominent part in a Falange attempt at assassinating General Varela, then Minister of War, at a Carlist ceremony in Bilbao. The attempt failed, though there wer
e a number of other people killed and wounded, and SUNDAE was arrested. In spite of the political issues involved, he was executed on 1 September 1942.
SUNDAE proved to be an enormously important agent as he was able to penetrate the Abwehr’s organisation in Algeciras and describe how the Germans, specifically Enrique Schumer and Francisco Zimmerman, employed intermediaries, such as Pedro Moreno and Marcelino Pardo, to manage their sabotage missions against Gibraltar. The identification of Pardo was especially significant as he was known to be close to Heinrich Langenheim, a figure of some notoriety in Spanish Morocco where he had been born in 1908, and where his father Adolf had taken up residence and made a considerable fortune as a mining engineer before his appointment as consul in Tetuan.
A committed Nazi, Heinrich Langenheim was married to an English wife, Jean Elizabeth Beckwith, and one of his brothers would be killed on the eastern front in April 1942. One of his other brothers, Oskar, was an Abt. II officer based in France, and Otto was a radio operator at the Madrid KO. Heinrich, a former law student previously employed in Joachim von Ribbentrop’s pre-war propaganda bureau in Berlin, had joined the Abwehr in 1940 and had been posted first to Barcelona under commercial cover, then to Morocco, and finally Seville. His principal agent was Pedro Dominguez, a retired Guardia Civil corporal who owned the NPU Bar in Algeciras and would be implicated in the case of the Gibraltar saboteur José Estella Key, who was executed in London in July 1942.
In contrast to the well-known Langenheim family, not much was on file about Enrique Schumer, but it was significant that his address in Madrid, Calle Francisco Silvela 21, was the same as Blaum, the KO’s head of Abt. II.
SUNDAE’s departure for Germany in November 1941 eliminated him as a source of information on the Abwehr’s activities and intentions, but the discovery on 16 December of a bomb concealed in a Hawker Hurricane aircraft due to be loaded aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Argus for delivery to Malta proved that Emilio Plazas was active. Code-named PEG, Plazas was a fanatical member of the Falange and of the feared Requete, who had been excluded from Gibraltar in March 1941. He had been recruited by Colonel Eleuterio Rubio, and in turn had assembled a large network of agents but his organisation was penetrated almost from the outset. His principal assistant was his old school friend Carlos Calvo, a former army officer who stored Plazas’ explosives at his family home in Puemte Mayorga, and he liaised closely with an Abt. II officer, Alberto Carbe, who was based at the Villa Leon, in the Calle Stamon, in Algeciras, and before the war had managed the Siemens electronics firm in Malaga before being appointed the German consul in Algiers.
Although Plazas claimed responsibility for several incidents of sabotage, his first confirmed act was an explosion aboard the anti-submarine trawler Erin on 18 January 1942, the handiwork of Fermin Mateos and Ramon Correa, which sank the vessel in the dockyard and killed four of the crew. The detonation also damaged the Honjo, moored in the next berth, with a loss of two of the crew, and damaged the Imperialist. Based on this perceived success, and Plazas’ boast that he had attacked a naval launch in the dockyard on 15 February, and had also made an attempt to sink the water tanker Blossom, which was saved from a time bomb by a vigilant Spanish policeman, he then embarked on a scheme to mount a sabotage offensive. He participated in a training programme sponsored by Abt. II centred at Cartagena where the SS Lipari, a German cargo ship built in Flensburg in 1930, was interned in December 1942. The plan was endorsed by Colonel Rubio and General Ungría at a conference held in Madrid in June that was also attended by STUFF, a freemason who had volunteered information to the DSO.
STUFF was a chauffeur who had been excluded from Gibraltar in May 1940 and was friendly with a pair of pre-war SIS assets, F.1 and F.2, both pro-monarchist brothers and, together with another Gibraltarian, code-named F, comprised the ‘F Group’, known informally as ‘the FRUITIES’. When F was evacuated to Madeira, along with the rest of the civilian population, F.1 and F.2 had remained in Spain, together with F’s brother, who took over his role, and in early 1942 reported to the DSO that STUFF had been approached by Plazas. To test STUFF’s integrity, the DSO had compared his initial reporting with similar material provided by Carlos Calvo, who had been introduced to the DSO by his mother, the WITCH, later in 1942. Calvo, code-named BRIE, corroborated STUFF’s information, and his activities were reported on by two other of Plazas’ recruits, Ramon Correa, code-named COCK, and his assistant, designated BULL. A dockyard labourer described as a ‘rogue, one of La Linea’s first Falangists’, Correra had not returned to work after the loss of the Erin. He had volunteered his services to the DSO in March 1942 in the hope of selling him information. Accordingly, although Plazas was unaware of the situation, four of his subordinates were informing on him, and on each other, to the DSO, who came to label them ‘the Crazy Gang’ after the popular London music hall show. Thus, by early 1943, the DSO had several insights into the enemy’s intentions, and this situation would continue for some months until BULL was called up for his Spanish military service.
The DSO decided to capitalise on this advantage by enhancing BRIE’s status, in the hope he would succeed Plazas, and by drawing in a couple of independent operators, Fermin Mateos and Alfonso Olmo. A bus driver in Gibraltar burdened with a large family, Olmo had been given a quantity of explosives, incendiaries and timers in March 1942 by BRIE, acting on Plazas’ instructions. However, he was served with an exclusion order in October, which forced him to rely on others to smuggle his bombs into Gibraltar, and his nominee, as suggested by the DSO, was an imaginary Ernesto Cozas. This news was greeted with enthusiasm by the Germans, but eventually Olmo came under pressure to produce Cozas, especially when Olmo claimed that his recruit had started a fire that had destroyed several aircraft on the airfield. The Germans were sceptical about this news as none of their observation posts in La Linea could provide corroboration, but Olmo persuaded Ramon Correa to confirm his version in return for a slice of the Abt. II bounty. This episode was described to the DSO by Correa in his capacity as COCK, although Olmo himself failed to report it himself to the DSO. When Olmo had to find someone to masquerade as Emilio Cozas he chose an acquaintance living in La Linea, employed as an electrician in the dockyard, who promptly contacted the DSO and he assigned him the code name OGG. However, when a new personality, a chemist code-named GON, took control of the local Abt. II organisation he soon realised that OGG was a fraud, and denounced Olmo to Baumann, who understandably lost confidence in both agents.
Undeterred by this setback, OGG volunteered to commit another (sic) act of sabotage and was asked to place a bomb in a depth charge carried on the deck of HMS Manxman, a destroyer undergoing repairs in one of the dockyard’s dry docks. Instead of fulfilling his assignment, OGG simply handed over the explosives to the DSO, who was unable to disguise the fact that Manxman completed its repairs and sailed without interference.
One essential first step in the DSO’s scheme was publicity given to a major fire in an ammunition tunnel in March 1942, so BRIE could take the credit. This duly happened, and when BRIE visited Madrid for his reward he claimed the credit for the fake sabotage. This expedient, of stage-managing a bogus sabotage incident, had the double advantage of building up the reputation of a valuable informant and of explaining the removal of a bomb from the German store. This was the strategy adopted to develop COCK, who had been given a high-explosive device disguised as a car battery in December 1942 and had supposedly smuggled it aboard the anti-submarine trawler Honja, which had blown up while on patrol. In reality the Honja had been unseaworthy since COCK’s destruction of the nearby Erin and almost sank by itself before it had been towed out to sea and destroyed by SOE.
Although COCK was never fully trusted by his handler, and was placed on the Abwehr’s payroll full-time in June, after just three months, he produced BULL’s elder brother, an unemployed Spaniard code-named FROG, in September and reported his successful recruitment to the Germans in Seville. Unexpectedly, having added FROG to the Abt. II’s c
omplement, COCK advised him in November to make contact with the British, evidently unaware that FROG had actually been serving the DSO for the past month. This bizarre set of events created something of a crisis for the DSO when COCK demanded British help in setting up a sabotage incident. Naturally, as COCK was already known to be responsible for the deaths of six seamen on the Erin and Honja, his ‘black record’ could not be ignored by the DSO, and he was equally reluctant to trust FROG, even if his younger brother BULL was informing on him. Finally, after much disagreement between Medlam and Scherr, they agreed to conjure up an act of sabotage that would account for the explosives smuggled into Gibraltar by FROG in December 1942. The incident was duly arranged in January, and an old hulk in the Commercial Anchorage was torched deliberately, but misrepresented as a fully laden oil and fuel lighter. This was the version peddled by COCK, who accompanied BULL to Madrid to receive his reward from the Germans. The pair was escorted by BRIE, so upon their return the DSO received three separate reports from the participants, each reporting on the others and, although BULL’s account was judged to be the most accurate, the decision was taken by the DSO to develop BRIE because BULL was about to be called up, and COCK had too much blood on his hands.
Naturally the Germans were delighted with COCK’s performance, and BULL and BRIE were encouraged to undertake more missions. In support of this objective, the DSO arranged another charade, a fire in an ammunition tunnel off Green Lane, which was widely reported on 10 March. Once again, BULL was summoned to Madrid to receive the Abwehr’s congratulations but, on the DSO’s instructions, introduced an entirely new personality as a potential leader. The candidate, GON, was a fully qualified chemist as well as a British agent, and the Germans were so impressed by him that in April he was appointed co-ordinator of all Abt. II operations directed against Gibraltar.