Codeword Overlord

by Nigel West

  Paul-Taboschat was a Kondor Legion veteran who was partner in a Spanish cork firm, Anglomera, and widely known as Don Pablo.19 Allegedly he was married to a German woman ‘of good family’ whose sister owned a hotel in Barcelona. And he was heard to remark that he came from Berlin, and owned a factory just outside the city. He worked on the ground floor at Calle Descartes 5, with a private residence close by at Valle Vico 6, and was succeeded in July 1943 by Colonel Conrad Feidler, recently wounded on the Russian front, who occupied an office at Plaza Cataluna 4 with the nameplate ‘Thomas Kroger’.

  According to the Abwehr defector Hans Ruser, code-named JUNIOR, who switched sides in Lisbon in November 1943 and was interrogated at Camp 020 the following month, Paul-Taboschat was anti-Nazi and had a very pretty wife. In his recollection, Feidler lived at Balmes 183, 50, and was very unpopular with his staff. Described as ‘a typical Prussian military type’ and ‘a very good musician’, he was also ‘rumoured to be a degenerate’. A survivor of two years fighting on the Russian front, and combat experience in Tunisia with the Afrika Korps, his torso was alleged to be covered with scars, and at the time of his defection Ruser thought he was to be replaced by another Wehrmacht officer. Supposedly Feidler was on poor terms with Paul-Taboschat, whom he felt spent too much time on his private affairs and not enough on the Abwehr.

  Ruser identified Feidler’s deputy (and ‘effective chief’) as Gottfried Paul-Taboschat, and gave his address as Paseo San Gervasio 163, 40, 1a, and his office as Calle Bertran 17, which was staffed by Guillermo Rueth and Schwartzmann. In November 1943, Paul-Taboschat rented more office space at Plaza Baranguer 2, and the local SIS officer named his mistress as Maria Teresa Pendas Gonzalez, of Mintaner 341, 40, 40.

  Other Nest personnel included Georg Schesak, known as ‘Colonel Gregoire’, residing at Mintaner 83, 40, 30; who supervised agent recruitment in Marseilles and the Midi. The office cashier was Walter Leutner Hass, known as Don Ernesto; the wireless operator was Eduardo Zintoraff, known as Don Alfredo; and the secretariat was headed by Kurt Piwonka, alias Don Julio. The Nest’s two Spanish staff were Ricardo Gemares, from the Deutsche Bank, and Luis Herminas, an employee of the Labour Front. The remainder of the staff consisted of two assistants, Tomas Falkner and Johan Schorhorster, and Luis Fernandez de la Reguer Noriego, who handled all matters relating to air intelligence. The counter-espionage branch consisted of a German officer code-named AHUDDIN and another, Captain Schulz-Insbl. Finally, representing the Nest at the Madrid KO was Eberhard Kiechebusch of I-H, who lodged at the Pension Palermo, Plaza de las Cortes 4.

  Paul-Taboschat’s second-in-command, known as PEDRO, was Alberto Koepke, an I-H officer regarded by the British as an exceptionally dangerous adversary, and for sheer industry he had no equal. Between December 1942 and August 1944 he was estimated through analysis of his ISOS traffic to have crossed the frontier into France on average once every ten days, and had been responsible for recruiting between 100 and 150 agents, mainly in Paris, Brussels and Marseilles, many of them destined for infiltration into Great Britain, Canada and the United States. Others would go to South America and North Africa. Koepke was remembered by all that met him for his imposing presence, and was driven across Spain and France in several different cars including a Citroën registered in Perpignan, and another carrying Paris plates.

  Thought ‘a disreputable character’, Bertie Koepke was a corpulent 40-year-old in 1944, having been born to a French mother, originally from Bordeaux, in Montmoreau in France in February 1904, and was a very prosperous businessman married to a Cuban.20 Before the war he had run a jam factory in Figueros inherited from his father, and had owned a ham and sausage tinning plant in Girona. Always well-dressed, he had served as an interpreter in the Kondor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, and had reputedly owned a brothel in Barcelona. He held the rank of captain in the Wehrmacht and smoked Diann cigarettes, bought on the black market. He lived in considerable style at 70 Avenida de Republica Argentina and was referred to generally and with some deference as Don Pedro. Accordingly, his organisation became known as PEDRO, equaled only by BORIS, a network headed by a White Russian, Boris Lowschin. Post-war interrogation reports of KO Madrid personnel, including Joachim Walter who very helpfully had kept a diary, suggested that Koepke had been associated with the pre-war German consulate at Paseo de Gracia 132 in Barcelona, but had persuaded the Abwehr that he would be more effective operating under an independent, commercial cover. Under Koepke’s direction, the PEDRO network would encompass more than two dozen safe houses and postboxes in and around Barcelona. According to one of his subordinates, Otto Roessl, employed to assist in smuggling agents across the French border, Koepke ran a highly profitable sideline by purchasing cars from a French contact in Perpignan and selling them in Spain.

  Although Koepke probably ranked third in the Nest’s hierarchy, he was responsible for liaison with the Spanish authorities, and developed close links with Major Maristany, the senior Spanish intelligence officer in Military Zone IV, and the governor of the province of Girona. Evidently these relationships worked well, for when in January 1944 the British denounced Paul-Taboschat as an important German spy, he was able to ridicule the accusation, claiming to be too affluent a businessman to engage in espionage.

  There were two techniques characteristic of the PEDRO network that served to tip off MI5 and SIS to an attempted infiltration. One was his preference for French aviators who were routinely given the same mission, to reach England as a refugee, join the air force and then steal an aircraft. This was the familiar assignment given to Pierre Arend (code-named FATHER); an I-L agent, Josef Terradellas, code-named LIPSTICK;21 QUIXOTE, Maurice Bothereau, arrested in Casablanca in December 1943; Hans Laski, arrested in Trinidad; Andrina Otero, an American dancer who declared details of her mission to the FBI in May 1941; Fernando Lipkau Balleta, arrested in Trinidad in May 1943; Jean Huysmans, posing as a refugee in Lisbon in May 1943; Marcel de Rappard, a Belgian refugee recruited in 1941 in Stuttgart, having been imprisoned briefly in a concentration camp; Roger Grosjean (FIDO); Jean Fraval, a Frenchman who confessed to his mission at an interview conducted in the British Consulate in Barcelona in February 1943; José Aparacio Polo, a Spaniard recruited in Kiel; Georges Feguine, a French pilot who travelled to Gibraltar in June 1943; Louis Gatouillat, who was interviewed in Casablanca in May 1944; Justin Tocabens, interrogated at Camp 020 in August 1944; Hans Ruser (JUNIOR); Jacques de Duve, sent to Camp 020 in February 1944; and Henri de Monteron (alias Georges Fressay, alias Nicolas de Tikhmenev), a White Russian interned at Camp 020 in December 1943. There was also a link to Brussels, as happened with Pierre Neukermans, a Belgian executed in London in June 1944. All had been given the same cover story of a method adopted by Koepke to enable his agents to evade the police controls near the French frontier at Col de Perthus.

  QUIXOTE was a bogus refugee who approached the British embassy in Madrid in April 1942 to reveal his espionage mission to Chad and identify PEDRO as the German officer who had recruited and trained him in an office on the first floor of Rambla de Catalunia 29, Barcelona, which he described as a spy centre for agents destined for North Africa.

  All these spies conformed to a pattern, masquerading as refugees with very similar cover stories, and each individually described their supervision by Koepke, who directed them to Algiers, Morocco, England, Canada and the United States. The scale of his industry was unprecedented, and MI5’s Blanshard Stamp took the view that if even a single one of his agents got through the screening process to engage in espionage, that such a mission carried out at a particularly critical moment might have results of a far-reaching and most disastrous character, the implications of which it is difficult to exaggerate.

  The fear, of course, was that an uncontrolled spy might penetrate the security ring around Britain and puncture the FORTITUDE deception. Bertie Koepke’s activities represented a potent threat in the months before D-Day, and information from Friedrich Muller, a stay-behind agent captured in Franc
e during the battle of Normandy, suggested the Abwehr in Barcelona had also planned post-invasion organisations to operate in newly liberated areas, behind the Allied lines. A trained radio operator, Muller had served in the French Foreign Legion and had been recruited in Barcelona with two fellow legionnaires. Under interrogation at Camp 020 in August 1944, Muller identified Koepke as his German controller, thereby confirming Koepke’s status as representing perhaps the most potent threat to the D-Day deceptions. However, after the Allies landed in France Koepke took care not to venture across the Spanish frontier, so he was never captured or interrogated, which meant his reputation would be built in MI5’s files through the testimony of his many contacts.

  6

  BODYGUARD SPIES

  ‘The enemy had been very clever at playing no end of false reports into the hands of the German command. The Oberkommando of H Gp B was well aware of the complete lack of agents having insight to Allied invasion plans.’ Colonel Anton Staubwasser

  Chief, Army Group B Intelligence

  The key to the FORTITUDE gamble was the reliance of the Abwehr on spies that it considered dependable, but in reality were double agents operating under Allied control. The first footing for the scheme was the arrival in Lisbon of TRICYCLE1 at the end of February 1944, equipped with an embryonic order of battle for the 21st Army Group, with the rather unambitious hope of establishing its component parts in various fixed locations so later reports could be submitted indicating their movement across the country in anticipation of a massive embarkation.

  The resources available to MI5 to perpetrate the deception was a stable of seventeen double agents, of whom seven communicated by wireless transmitter. The remainder maintained contact through secret writing concealed in the mail and sent to cover addresses in Lisbon and Madrid. Given the emphasis on speed, MI5’s nominees comprised those agents with access to a radio, being TATE,2 BRUTUS, GARBO (through ALMURA), TRICYCLE (via his friend FREAK3), the untrustworthy TREASURE,4 and two young men in Iceland, COBWEB and BEETLE.

  The first to fall, almost literally, into MI5’s hands was Wulf Schmidt, a young Dane from Abenraa in north Schleswig who had parachuted into Cambridgeshire in September 1940 and had been captured almost immediately. He had commenced transmitting to his controller in Hamburg-Wohldorf under the supervision of a Radio Security Service (RSS) technician and an MI5 case officer the following month, and had remained utterly reliable, living in Hertfordshire but pretending from May 1944 to be working on a farm in Wye, near Ashford in Kent. As a channel to the enemy, TATE had only one disadvantage. While the other double agents communicated with their Abwehr controllers through Paris or Madrid, thus allowing their relayed traffic to be monitored by the RSS, TATE’s receiving station on the outskirts of Hamburg was connected to Berlin by a landline, so interception of his material, and the Abwehr’s reaction to it, was denied to his British handlers. This lacuna meant that MI5 was unable to adjust TATE’s activities to satisfy the Abwehr’s demands, and left his case officers largely in the dark about his perceived status.

  Although easily the longest contact with the enemy, having transmitted more than 1,000 messages, sending daily weather reports, TATE was only really in a position to report on his observations in the locality, although he did acquire a notional girlfriend, Mary, who was employed as a cipher clerk in the Admiralty and could occasionally retail some indiscreet office gossip. She was TATE’s main source of strategic intelligence, and on 23 May he explained why she had been temporarily silent:

  Saw Mary for the first time in a long while. She was sent on a special mission to Washington. She says she worked on preparations for an independent expeditionary force which will leave the United States for Europe. That is all I have found out so far.

  However, on 27 May, TATE had further news:

  Saw Mary. Found out that before mentioned expeditionary force consists of six divisions. Its commander is General Fredendall. The objective for this army in Mary’s opinion, is South France but I believe that Mary herself does not know much on this point.

  Actually, General Lloyd Fredendall, who had been commander of the US Army II Corps in Tunisia after the TORCH landings, had been defeated by Rommel at the Kasserine Pass in March 1943 and, having been replaced by George Patton, was sent home to a training role in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not trusted with another combat role, but his name was thought to be well-known to OKW because of his combat with the Afrika Korps.

  The next double agent to have arrived was a Yugoslav lawyer, Dusan Popov, who had been recruited for the Germans by a university friend in Belgrade in 1940, and had immediately reported the arrangement to the Secret Intelligence Service station commander at the local embassy. When Popov turned up in Lisbon in mid-December 1940 he reported to his Abwehr contact, Albrecht von Auenrode, who briefed him on his mission to London, and to the passport control officer, Richmond Stopford, to whom he imparted enough information to establish his loyalty and be granted permission to fly to England on 20 December.

  Upon his arrival at the Savoy Hotel, Popov was questioned by MI5 officers, who learned the identity of his contacts in England. He was supported over the following month before returning to Lisbon, and then travelled to Madrid, to report to his original recruiter, Johann Jebsen, who was a member of the Jebsen shipping family in Hamburg. Of Danish heritage, Jebsen had met Popov while they were both undergraduates at Freiburg University, and the two playboys had stayed in touch.5

  By the time BODYGUARD was contemplated, in November 1943, Popov had fulfilled Abwehr assignments, sponsored by MI5, to the United States and Rio de Janeiro with varying degrees of success, and had acquired a radio transmitter that was supposedly operated from December 1943 by his close friend, the Marquis de Bona, code-named FREAK. ISOS intercepts suggested that Popov was still trusted, and his official role, working for the Yugoslav government-in-exile, provided him with plausible pretexts for travel to Portugal. It was on one of these trips, at the end of February 1944, that Popov handed the Abwehr details of the Allied order of battle, including Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. This information would be circulated in Lagebericht No. 1199, dated 9 March 1944:

  A V–Mann message which reached the Abteilung on 7 March 1944, brought particularly valuable information about the British formations in Great Britain. The reliability of the report could be checked. It contains information about three armies, three army corps and twenty-three divisions, among which the displacement of only one formation must be regarded as questionable. The report confirmed our overall operational picture.

  Having played a useful role in laying the foundation of FORTITUDE, Popov would be eased out of the deception campaign because of his friendship with Jebsen, which began to pose a threat to the entire XX scheme. There had always been an element of danger in the genuine friendship between Jebsen and Popov, and MI5 was obliged to rely on Popov’s own version of his conversations with his Abwehr handler, and on the occasional fragments that emerged in the ISOS traffic, allowances having been made for Jebsen’s lack of candour with his superiors. To the Abwehr, Popov was the head of a London-based spy ring consisting of friends he had recruited personally and Yugoslavs who had posed as escapees. However, Jebsen’s case was rather more complex because, according to Popov, he was an anti-Nazi and had received his organisation’s permission to develop contacts with SIS. This situation posed a dilemma for SIS and MI5, which were reluctant to cultivate Jebsen, now code-named ARTIST, recognising that he could have duped Popov. On the other hand, the risks of contact had to be weighed against the potential advantage of running a spy deeply embedded inside the Lisbon KO. At the outset, in September 1943, Jebsen told his SIS contact what he knew:

  The Red-Spanish group which is working in England for the KO Spain and which according to Kuhlenthal is now 17 men strong, will shortly also open a wireless station in America. The payment for this group is for the next nine months. Mention was made with £7,500, for which 750,000 pesetas were paid in the way reported previously. If I remem
ber rightly, the amount of this payment was at variance with the details given me by the same source previously. As I assume that in London there is exact knowledge of this group, I have made no further enquiries, but can do so if required.

  This alarming message, delivered independently of Popov, indicated that Jebsen knew details of GARBO’s spy ring, and strongly suggested that the German had more than a suspicion that the network was known to the authorities in London. Plainly this was intended to mean GARBO, who had persuaded the Madrid KO that his wireless operator ALMURA was a Communist sympathiser and conscientious objector employed at the EKCO electronics factory who believed he was working for a Spanish republican organisation. In reality, ALMURA was Charles Haines, a Radio Security Service technician.

  If Popov had misjudged Jebsen, there was a good chance that the organisations of both TRICYCLE and GARBO would be compromised. Worse, a detailed analysis of past messages might betray FORTITUDE. In these circumstances MI5 and SIS exercised extreme caution, and Popov’s MI5 case officer, Ian Wilson, was assigned the task of flying to Portugal to handle Jebsen with Section V’s Charles de Salis.6

  Wilson’s task was made all the more difficult by the existence of another Abwehr asset, Dr Hans Ruser, who was simultaneously negotiating his own defection to the British in Madrid and that of his mother. Ostensibly a journalist who had been based in Spain since 1937, Ruser was not trusted by the British after he had made a tentative approach to the senior Polish intelligence officer in Lisbon, and to his Czech counterpart, Colonel Pan. Unfortunately, Pan’s assistant, Major Alexander, was also working for the Abwehr, and betrayed Ruser, as became evident in the Lisbon ISOS traffic. Nevertheless, the Poles and the Czechs passed Ruser on to the British, in the person of Major Thompson, the assistant military attaché at the British embassy. By the middle of December 1943 he had been brought to England by SIS via Gibraltar to undergo interrogation, as Guy Liddell recorded in his diary on 10 December: