by Nigel West
In May 1943, Angel Gauceda Sarasota, a Basque lorry driver in the dockyard, reported to the GSP that he had been approached by BRIE to plant a time bomb on HMS Manxman or, failing that, in an ammunition store or a fuel tank. Gauceda was immediately recruited by the DSO, to whom he passed several pieces of sabotage equipment including a timing pencil, detonator and bomb. Code-named NAG, Gauceda would operate as an effective double agent for the next two years.
It was at this critical point that BRIE switched sides and planned an act of sabotage on his own initiative, without alerting the DSO, involving José Martin Muñoz, who had been selected for the task by Mateos and a former army officer from Bilbao, Paciano Gonzalez. BRIE’s original plan had depended on Manuel Pontalea Carrasco, but he was served with an exclusion order, which forced Calvo to look elsewhere. The result was Muñoz, who planted a bomb that exploded on Coaling Island on 30 June. Realising too late that BRIE had deceived him, the DSO arranged for an official complaint to be lodged with the Spanish authorities, who raided BRIE’s home on 25 July and found enough incriminating documents to compromise Mateos and Gonzalez. Both were arrested and incarcerated, albeit temporarily, in the San Roque prison. Taken completely by surprise, and alarmed that apparently there was a sabotage group working beyond the DSO’s control, his agents were tasked to find out who had been responsible for the incident, and was duly informed by NAG that Gonzalez had boasted to him of his role in recruiting a young dockyard labourer. This Spaniard was identified by the GSP from his description as José Martin Muñoz, who had not returned to work since the incident. When NAG eventually engineered a meeting with Muñoz, and cultivated him, he learned that there was a second bomb concealed in Gibraltar, which Muñoz intended to plant in the dockyard’s power station when the opportunity arose. Subsequently, as Muñoz attempted to cross the frontier at Four Corners on 29 July, he was detained by a vigilant GSP sergeant and interrogated. In his confession Muñoz revealed that his second bomb had been hidden in the coal cellar of the Café Imperial, and it was recovered.
The need to promote NAG in the eyes of the enemy prompted a fake act of sabotage that was stage-managed by the DSO for his benefit. With his stock rising, NAG was introduced to a senior Falangist in La Linea, Emilio Galan Buhigas, who used his position in the local labour exchange to recruit saboteurs and infiltrate them into Gibraltar. NAG identified every one of them, and they were prevented from crossing the frontier, thereby protecting the Rock from further attack.
Having been misled by at least ten double agents who had worked under the direction of the DSO and his staff, Abteilung II gave the impression to colleagues in Madrid and Berlin that it was conducting a successful campaign against Gibraltar, its scope only limited by Spanish incompetence. The reality, of course, was an impressive degree of ingenious manipulation that usually saw MI5 extending its area of operations into southern Spain, with the full support of Gibraltar’s SIS station, an organisation ill-equipped to meet the Abwehr challenge in the region, as David Scherr recalled:
In the summer of 1943, we found that the increasing scope of our counter-sabotage, and later counter-espionage, work was leading us to send a continuous stream of enquiries to the Section V representative whenever their own information wanted checking outside the Gibraltar area. It became apparent that O’Shagar, who was apparently grossly overworked, could not keep pace with us. The situation obviously produced its petty irritations, and there is good reason to think that it would have been considerably more efficient had the interests of the Security Service and those of Section V in the Campo de Gibraltar been combined early in 1943 instead of waiting till 1944.
Two [sic] simple examples will suffice to show the dangers of such a division of almost identical interests.
The F group was producing prolific and not uninteresting reports day after day, with which O’Shagar found himself unable to deal adequately; and although a great proportion of this material was definitely of local counterespionage and counter-sabotage interest to the DSO, it came over in insufficient quantities to be of any use, and the efforts of the F group were totally unrelated to what our own people were doing at the same time and in the same places. Sometimes we were working at definite cross purposes through insufficient liaison, as for instance when our XX agent SAN JUAN was waiting to receive a bomb from an enemy agent in Gibraltar whom we were prepared to have arrested, while the Section V representative was working hard for Pedro Lopez Marquez to bring in a bomb to hand to an enemy agent whom he would have arrested. As Pedro Lopez Marquez’s bomb was intended for SAN JUAN no-one was able to arrest anyone …
This nonsensical kind of lack of coordination worthy of inclusion in Compton Mackenzie’s Water on the Brain, was gradually solved during the latter part of 1943 by the gradual cessation of activity on the part of the Section V representative.
On 21 February 1944, when Colonel Medlam was succeeded as DSO by Philip Kirby-Green, the DSO took over the Section V responsibilities in the Campo area. This area was later extended to include Malaga. The Section V work did not entail a great expansion of activity, but it did necessitate a very large increase in the clerical work involved in the preparation of reports for two different Head Offices, and for such Section V outstations as were interested.
In March 1943 it was calculated that the Security Intelligence Department had on its records the names of nearly two hundred informers, of whom one hundred were active and regular informers, seventy-five were more or less casual informers, some of them inactive at that time, while the remaining few had been dismissed or had permanently ceased to function as agents.
Out of this total of nearly two hundred it is worth noting that only twenty names were taken over from Section V in February 1944 and of those twenty, ten were quite inactive and remained so. More than two-thirds of the total number were agents being run by us prior to our taking over Section V here, the remainder having been recruited in February and March 1944.
As far as payment is concerned, only 19 out of the whole total were retained on permanent fee, 43 were paid according to results, and the remaining (over 125) received no payment at all for their services.
Thus it was agreed between MI5 and SIS that the DSO would extend his coverage into Spain, an unusual arrangement prompted by the replacement of Desmond Bristow by Aelred O’Shagar, an Irish former priest who did not speak Spanish. Nor did his assistant, Brian Morrison, formerly of the SIS station in Helsinki, who was fluent in Russian, German, Chinese and French.
Section V’s best agent, SCHOOLMASTER, who had been recruited in 1942, was based in La Linea, but he was evacuated in secret to England when conditions became too dangerous, and the DSO inherited his cousin, T-52, a woman with access to DGS reports in the area.
Among the other women agents on the DSO’s books was Antonia Chozas Avilla, code-named WITCH. She lived in Puente Mayorga and was the mother of two agents, Carlos and Augusto Calvo. Another spy was the wife of Manuel Romero, Puente Mayorga’s harbourmaster, code-named THE QUEEN OF HEARTS. When he first encountered her, Scherr recalled her as ‘the most extraordinary visitor’:
This was a woman in her thirties whose dress, mannerisms, speech and general appearance made her a rather seedy but not unattractive imitation of the seductive female spy of the thrillerette type. She sat down in front of the office desk and crossed her legs (adjusting the hem of her skirt to reveal them to the best advantage), slowly lit a cigarette, inhaled, breathed out the smoke in the approved, furtive fashion looking down her long and acquilane [sic] nose at the same time, and then smiled across at her interrogator-to-be and said, in cosmopolitan English, ‘I am the QUEEN OF HEARTS. Who are you?’
Her sister was married to a German officer in Paris and she had been recruited originally by the Abwehr in Madrid for a mission to Argentina. After her mission was cancelled she had offered her services to Ken Benton, who had not entirely trusted her. Nevertheless, she proved an efficient agent and recruited a former Spanish army officer, Carlos Calvo, code-named BRIE,
who in turn recruited Angel Gauceda Sarasota, a Basque employed as a lorry driver in the Gibraltar dockyard and code-named NAG. Ostensibly Calvo worked in Madrid as a clerk for the Falangist student union, the Sindicato Español Universitario, but in reality was Wolfgang Blaum’s link to the Spanish saboteurs.
Having supplied the DSO with a German questionnaire, a much-prized document, the QUEEN outlived her usefulness and in early 1944 moved with her husband to Seville.
In September 1943 the DSO recruited ‘a most disreputable type’, code-named T-8, who was a former Falangist and Spanish air force pilot ‘discharged for past freemasonry and crooked deals’. T-8 was well-connected, being the brother-in-law of two suspected Abwehr agents, Leopoldo Yome and Horatio Soler, the secretary of the Delegación de Fronteras in La Linea, and was also linked to Colonel Ignatio Molina18 and Captain Justo Grande. T-8’s initial approach had been to join the RAF as a pilot, but the DSO found him more useful in his role as an agent.
In October 1943 T-24 volunteered his service to the DSO and identified himself as a friend of Colonel Sanchez Rubio. Motivated by the promise of a supply of whisky, and the prospect of post-war business opportunities, the elderly T-24 passed on information gleaned from his Spanish contacts.
JEEP was a Spanish smuggler who brought perfume and watches into Gibraltar, and carried drugs and tobacco into Spain. Originally he had acted as a cut-out (intermediary) for GON but in 1943 he reported that he had been recruited by Antonio Pena Diaz as a member of Pacheco’s ship-watching organisation in La Linea:
JEEP had not made much progress when Pacheco was arrested and expelled from the Campo by the Spanish Police (at long last); but it did not take JEEP very long to get in touch with Pacheco’s successor, a Spaniard using the cover-name of ‘Don Carlos Luna’, whose real name was Calixto Rodriguez Duarte.
Rodriguez, whom we soon christened READY, used JEEP to maintain an observation post in the ex-Hotel Principe Alfonso, and also to run an espionage network inside Gibraltar. In order to penetrate READY’s organisation properly and to get beyond it, we allowed JEEP’s wife to operate the observation post, producing information of scant value to the enemy, and concentrated on slowly building up for JEEP inside Gibraltar an entirely notional group of spies.
Among these imaginary persons were an American Air force mechanic working at North Front Airfield, named Johnny Leden. This man, a composite but very plausible scoundrel, was the result of the joint efforts of imagination of the SID officers, and in his prime he earned, for many months, six hundred pesetas a month in payment for his treachery. This money JEEP put into his own pocket. We had previous experience of JEEP’s slippery ways with money, and we decided it was better to encourage him to tell us the whole truth frankly and quickly, and keep the money for himself, than to demand from him all money he received from the enemy, thus inducing him to lie to us. After all, the money mattered little, but his information and our penetration mattered much.
Leden’s information was worth much more than the Germans paid JEEP, and we had to make him keep complaining bitterly. However, Leden had no alternative but to continue to provide JEEP with information, because he would have been blackmailed had he stopped. His motives for treachery were entirely mercenary. He got himself caught up in espionage as a result of his becoming implicated with JEEP in a watch-smuggling racket months previously. Leden was able to supply apparently accurate and fairly high-grade information from his personal observation, enquiries and investigations, about the movement of planes, identity of air force personnel, passengers in transit, characteristics of planes stationed at Gibraltar, strength of air force contingent, and so on. All this information was very carefully manufactured and assembled by the SID officers from GSP chicken-feed reports, and from technical details taken from magazines on sale to the public, and was of course vetted beforehand at bi-weekly Services Intelligence Conferences specially convened for that purpose, as already described.
Proposed items of information which had more than local significance always had to be referred back to Head Office for consideration by the Twenty Committee, which existed to co-ordinate and control the supply of information to the enemy through our XX agents all over the world.
We also invented for JEEP an unconscious sub-agent, an English agreement worker in HM Dockyard, who supplied him with information from time to time about anti-torpedo devices used by Allied Shipping.
To cope with READY’s demand for more information, we then allowed JEEP to recruit another imaginary person, a Gibraltarian of Maltese origin with the unmusical name of George Borge, who divided his time between his taxi and his barber’s shop. Borge spoke good English, was inquisitive and quick-witted, and had been a steward on a P&O liner before the war. Borge’s information came from conversations in the barber’s shop and in the taxi, current rumours, and visible information, picked up on visits to HM Dockyard and to Waterport. We intended to develop Borge at a later date by giving him some interesting relatives whom he would tap for information - we were thinking of an uncle at the Colonial Hospital - but the war came to an end before we reached this stage.
The DSO’s grip on Abt. II activities in and around the Rock became evident in June 1943 with the arrest of another saboteur, Luis Cordon Cuenca, who had attempted to coerce Charles Denino, a dockyard worker from La Linea, into smuggling a bomb into Gibraltar. Denino revealed the plot to Philip Kirby Green, and a trap was laid when Denino was scheduled to meet Cordon Cuenca. Two months later Cordon Cuenca was sentenced to death, and he was executed in January 1944, on the same day as Muñoz. According to the DSO’s investigation, Cordon-Cuenca’s recruiter had been a Spanish army officer, Lieutenant Ramon Jover, of the 47th Infantry Regiment, based at San Roque, described as a prominent member of Narciso Perales’ sabotage group. Perales, a physician with the rank of lieutenant in the Spanish army, was a senior Falangist who had been responsible for the recruitment of several other saboteurs, among them Manuel Serna and Eduardo Onetto. Serna had been recruited by Elas Castro, and was excluded from Gibraltar after his arrest in June 1943.
As a direct consequence of the 1943 arrests, and the subsequent diplomatic protest to the Spanish government that followed, the tide changed in southern Spain and the Abwehr experienced slightly less co-operation from the central authorities, who had watched the Allies land in North Africa, virtually unopposed, and then the successful invasion of Sicily. Simultaneously, the DSO adapted to the new operational conditions and at the end of May 1944 the counter-intelligence position had improved to the point where the planners could indulge in a deception campaign. The scheme, code-named COPPERHEAD, was intended to ensure that General Montgomery was spotted in Gibraltar, while en route to a top-level conference in North Africa, thus leading the enemy to think that a new offensive in the Mediterranean theatre was imminent. Monty, of course, was otherwise occupied in the final planning for D-Day, so MI5’s Gilbert Lennox recruited Lieutenant Clifton James, a Royal Army Pay Corps officer who bore a striking resemblance to the 21st Army Group commander, to take on the role. James, accompanied by an MI5 officer, Marcus Haywood, dressed in a brigadier’s uniform, flew from Northolt early on 26 May in a York aircraft and arrived on the Rock in time to be entertained to lunch by the governor, Sir Ralph Eastwood. This charade was witnessed by the DSO’s F Group, which promptly reported the sighting to their controller, Francisco Escobar, and it was also arranged that Major Ignatio Molina would also see Monty. Molina, based at the Spanish military headquarters at Algeciras, was directly subordinate to Colonel Cores, a known Abwehr agent. Having ensured the required reporting to the Abwehr, James and his party flew on to Cairo and remained in seclusion until D+1. On 28 May, an ISOS intercept on the Madrid–Berlin channel demonstrated that the reports reached their intended destination, although there was no evidence recovered post-war to suggest the ploy had been taken seriously in Berlin. On the next day Guy Liddell confided to his diary:
The bogus Monty scheme appears to have been successful. His arrival in Gibr
altar has got to Madrid and has been wired through to Berlin. The whole thing was I believe very well staged in Gibraltar. A Spaniard named Molina was visiting the Governor at the time of ‘Monty’s’ arrival. He was shut in a room waiting to see the Governor, from the window of which he could see ‘Monty’ and the Governor walking up and down on the terrace. The only trouble about the scheme is that it had perhaps been placed a little too early.
After the war, when Leissner was interrogated in Germany, he was asked about his ‘semi-official’ relationship with Molina, which had stretched back to the Spanish Civil War, when the Spaniard had been in command of the Carabinieros in Algeciras. ‘He can add nothing about Molina’s sub-agent system and had not himself heard of the report concerning Montgomery. He states that this could quite easily have come from any one of the numerous workmen who crossed to Gibraltar daily at La Linea.’ Leissner was quite dismissive of Molina, recalling, ‘he was not the type of man from whom one could expect accurate information. He would talk for considerable periods in an endeavour to impress his listeners, but that nothing he said was of value.’
‡
The largest Abwehr representation outside Madrid was in Barcelona, where the local Nest, headed from January 1941 by Major Gottfried Paul-Taboschat, operated from a suite of ostensibly commercial offices at 640 Avenida José Antonio; Representaciones y Patentes Nacional, Calle Cordal 32-20; at Rambla de Cataluña 29, where the door was marked with the name of the Spanish newspaper La Prensa and ‘Forges de Alcala’; and at Calle Mallorca 57. The Nest also operated a training school at Peligroe 10, headed by Carl and Thomas Steinhausen, and ran a fleet of seventeen cars, some bearing embassy-registered CD plates.