by Nigel West
This particular item may account for Fidrmuc’s unusual status within the Abwehr, for he was always highly regarded, even though much of his product was valueless. When Heinrich Ahlrichs was asked about him in 1946, Guy Liddell recalled that:
He speaks well of OSTRO. He says that OSTRO’s cover in Freetown was effected through an employee of the Lisbon agency of an American export line who was later transferred to Freetown for his firm.
Although Liddell eventually concluded that OSTRO was a fraud, he did not always hold that view, and on 2 August 1942 had recorded that:
There has been a long OSTRO message about the Middle East giving our dispositions in detail. The service is that it is 90 percent accurate and denotes a serious leakage.
The following month, he complained again about OSTRO’s activities in the Middle East:
Another extremely reliable report has been obtained by the Germans from Egypt about the disposition of troops, stores et cetera. It comes from the OSTRO organisation.
On 20 September Liddell suggested the case had been solved:
Richmond Stopford had made a careful analysis of the OSTRO messages as a result of which he had come to the conclusion that they are being carried probably by BOAC pilots on the west coast routes.
MI5 enquiries in Africa and then the Middle East achieved nothing, and by August 1943 OSTRO had turned his attention to England, as Liddell confided:
OSTRO has been asked to report about concentrations on the south-east coast. From the point of view of deception, this suits us very well provided OSTRO reports correctly. This, however, is doubtful, as his information, which is alleged to come from civilian pilots, is usually extremely poor.
When in December 1943 TRICYCLE raised the subject of Fidrmuc with his Abwehr contact, Johann Jebsen, code-named ARTIST, more information about him emerged, although it did little to reveal his sources or the extent of his alleged network, as Liddell recalled:
According to ARTIST, OSTRO works direct to Einzheer in Berlin where one von Carnap has no function other than running OSTRO. The KriegsOrganization Portugal forward OSTRO’s reports for him but took no part in running his case. When von Carnap is out of Berlin, Beck, alias Wernicke, acts as his representative. OSTRO has never disclosed to Carnap or anyone else who his agents are or how he gets his information. ARTIST does not believe in him, but he is however regarded by Berlin as sort of a prima donna who must not be ruffled. Berlin sometimes sends other reports to OSTRO for his evaluation. ARTIST thinks this helps him to invent his own reports. A civil pilot is supposed to act as a courier for him about once a fortnight. He draws some money for his supposed agents, but not very much.
This news was hardly reassuring for MI5, indicating that OSTRO was handled at a very high level within the Abwehr by Wilhelm von Carnap, but Jebsen took a closer look at Fidrmuc, and his enquiries attracted adverse attention in April, as was evident from the relevant ISOS decrypts read in London by Liddell:
ARTIST himself appears to [be] under a cloud as far as his own people are concerned. They think that he is being too inquisitive, particularly about the OSTRO organisation. The Germans are doing their best to isolate him from information of this kind. Whether this is due to jealousy or suspicion is not clear. It may be that they are nervous about his discovering that OSTRO’s set-up is largely notional …
By May, Fidrmuc was speculating about the invasion, which was generally unwelcome, following FABIUS, a full dress rehearsal invasion exercise that was held off Southampton on 4 May:
I have seen the MSS reports on the enemy’s appreciation of our invasion intentions. It does not seem to me to be quite so bad as T.A. Robertson described it. On the other hand, wireless intelligence has given away a certain amount in relation to the exercise FABIUS and has set the Germans thinking as to whether we are likely to attack at high or low tide, when the obstacles which they have placed all along the coast will be more easily dealt with. Abwehr reports feature in all these summaries and have produced a plethora of dates of forthcoming operations. This apparently refers to OSTRO and the like since we have not so far committed ourselves in any way. We have merely reported factually and left the Germans to draw their own deductions.
The last straw seems to have been an ISOS message intercepted on 4 June and mentioned by Liddell the following day:
OSTRO in a long message which, though entirely inaccurate, has hit on the target area. T.A. Robertson has three times, backed by the Twenty Committee, put up suggestions for getting OSTRO blown. Each time the scheme has been turned down by C as he thought it would jeopardise the source. The information about the target area is supposed to have come from a colonel on Monty’s staff. This is clearly untrue but it is bound to cause considerable anxiety at 21st Army Group.
When in February 1946 Walter Schellenberg was interrogated in London, his views on OSTRO were sought, as Liddell recorded:
OSTRO was regarded as the best agent in military intelligence in Portugal and according to Schellenberg had a group of ten to twelve men working under him in London. (Our assumption was that all these people were notional). Schellenberg however maintains that he could inform us how much of OSTRO’s reports were invention and how much was Allied deception. He himself had great doubts but the army backed OSTRO.
In 1946 he was deported to Germany, where he was interrogated by the US Counterintelligence Corps and MI5’s Klop Ustinov in January 1947, but moved back to Spain after his release and was employed by Der Spiegel as the magazine’s Spanish correspondent until his death in Barcelona in October 1958.
When, after the war, MI5 investigated OSTRO, it was realised that Fidrmuc’s file dated back to January 1938, when a firm of geographical booksellers in Fleet Street, London, reported to Guy Liddell that a client in Hamburg had placed a large order for maps, technical manuals and Air Ministry publications. MI5 alerted SIS’s counter-intelligence section, headed by Valentine Vivian, who checked the address in Hamburg’s Marienterrasse and informed the French Deuxieme Bureau in Paris. Fidrmuc’s authenticity as the correspondent for a trade journal L’Usine was confirmed, and the French revealed that he had been making similar purchases in Paris since 1935.
Fidrmuc next came to SIS’s attention in September 1941 when his name cropped up on the periphery of an investigation into the Dutch KLM pilots flying the Lisbon–Whitchurch route, who were suspected, based on a tip from TRICYCLE, of passing information through the Lisbon KLM manager to the Abwehr. Popov had gained that impression from an indiscreet remark made by von Auenrode, and SIS had focused on a pilot, Dirk Parmentier, and his manager, Francis Van der Vleit. Nothing incriminating was found, but MI5’s Ned Reid discovered that Fidrmuc had held a bank account at the Chase National Bank in Moorgate since 1923, and had moved it to New York in 1939.
SIS’s investigation of Fidrmuc in Lisbon showed him to be living next to a retired British ambassador, Sir Walford Selby, in Estoril at the Villa Igloo, on a golf course in the rua Alfonso Henriques. There the case would probably have ended if ISOS decrypts had not disclosed in January 1942 a spy code-named OSTRO who purported to run an espionage ring in England. An analysis of the traffic undertaken by Herbert Hart of MI5’s B1(b) section in October 1942, entitled ‘Ostro in England’, detailed the evidence:
Since January 1942, the German Intelligence Service in Lisbon has received from OSTRO at least thirty-seven reports covering Egypt, South Africa, India, America and the UK. Of these thirty-seven, fourteen have been either wholly or in part concerned with information from the UK and all of them have been totally incorrect. They have not been merely inaccurate, but are elaborate inventions packed with circumstantial details and carefully planned to give the impression of a well-placed body of agents sending information from the UK. We know that OSTRO really has an agent of first-class calibre working for him in Egypt and there seems no doubt that in order to enhance his value in the eyes of the Germans he has built on this solid foundation an entirely imaginary organisation in the UK which he would have the Germans
believe is providing information of equal value to that of his Egypt agent. That he has succeeded in this deception is clear from the fact that the Germans are willing to go to the trouble of transmitting his reports from England at as great a length as those from Egypt and on 29 June 1942 OSTRO was asked urgently to obtain information concerning the total strength of American troops in the UK. The particulars required were number of divisions being drawn up with provisional numbers, names of the commanders, individual units, troop movements to England, and names and size of the troop transports. We do not know how OSTRO dealt with this request as the only reference to American troops in England which we have seen is contained in a brief extract from a report which was in the hands of the German Intelligence Service on 7 July 1942. This appears to deal in a general way with the distribution of small units of American troops for training purposes.
A study of the OSTRO messages from the UK gives some idea of the notional organization which he has planted on the Germans and the means he adopts to lend a verisimilitude to it. It is not possible to guess exactly how large an organization OSTRO claims to have in the UK but twice reference is made to two reliable agents in England, one of these agents having definitely stated to be on an aircraft travelling between the UK and Portugal and by implication it is this agent who brings the reports. From the dates of the reports and the dates of their onward transmission from Lisbon or Berlin it is clear that they are notionally brought by air as on only three occasions is there an interval of as much as eight days between the date of the reports and its onward transmission and in the majority of cases only three or four days elapse. On one occasion the report is dated 30th August and is transmitted to Berlin on 1 September.
The reports cover naval, military and air force matters and are divided into three categories referred to as Reports T, Reports P, and Reports I.
Reports T
These deal with naval and military matters. The first T Report on 16 January 1942 describes the ships in Liverpool and Carlisle [sic] on that day. Eleven ships are named, one being the Georgio (the loss of which had of course been published some time previously). The report goes on to give the route of the convoys formed by these transports and quotes as the source of this information the Embarkation Officer’s statement, the implication being, of course, that the information was obtained locally by personal contact. Apart from the Georgio the other eleven vessels named had either been sunk by this date or were in the Far East. The troops of this convoy, according to the report, were concentrated in Wales, Lancashire, and Lanchester [sic] and the details were therefore unobtainable – another hint as to the agent’s locality. Fleetwood and Preston are quoted as ports of embarkation and details of the escort are also given, together with the estimated date of departure. This report with all its wealth of detail is a complete fabrication and is typical of OSTRO’s style except that it contains a rather higher proportion of elementary mistakes than usual. The information, however, was considered sufficiently valuable by the Germans for onward transmission to a length of 293 words.
The second T Report dated 14 May 1942 claims as the source of its information positive knowledge emanating from Vice Admiral Edward L.S. King, Assistant Chief of Naval Staff. This states that orders have been given for North Atlantic convoys to be escorted by capital ships and that the next convoy so escorted would leave the northern entrance to the St George’s Channel on the 18th May; again, the information is false.
The third T Report dated 15 May 1942 is concerned with a fictional account of preparations for a Commando raid said to be taking place in Scotland. To lend weight to this report a further report of 22 May 1942 stated that the Commandos concerned had disembarked in the Shetlands and claimed that this had been confirmed by the Mountbatten household in London.
The last T Report is dated 4 July and deals chiefly with the training of American forces in the UK. A touch of local colour is than [sic] added by the statement that HM Stationary [sic] Office had ordered a large quantity of maps of Corsica (1:80,000) from G. Philip & Son, London. That is an interesting use by Fidrmuc of knowledge acquired during his prewar activities when he was buying large quantities of maps from Phillips on behalf of the Germans.
Reports P
These are concerned with civil and service aviation information which is supplied by an agent who is notionally a member of the crew of an aircraft travelling between the UK and Portugal. In this connection it should be remembered that Fidrmuc is known to be on friendly terms with Van der Vliet, manager of KLM in Portugal. It may be assumed that his acquaintance with Van der Vliet is well known to the Germans in Lisbon and that he trades on this acquaintance to lend an air of reality to the claim that he has an agent on one of the KLM planes who is in a position to obtain information about the movements of aircraft to and from the UK with particulars of the passengers carried. It is hardly necessary to add that the information contained in the P Reports is as untrue as all the rest. It is amusing however, to note the touch of the artist when in the report of 29 April 1942 describing the fictitious flight of various named personalities from the UK for a conference in Gibraltar, OSTRO adds a note pointing out that the last similar meeting in Gibraltar was connected with the start of the Cyrenaica offensive.
The P Report of 24 June 1942 states that on a flight from England to Portugal the conversation turned mainly on supplies for the Middle East and that one of the passengers was a Colonel of the RASC who was going to Africa with special powers (as he said) to mobilize what supplies and material he could. The RASC Colonel in fact travelled by plane from the UK to Portugal on the 13th June.
Two reports dealt with information concerning the aerodromes at Exeter. Both imply that Exeter has been personally visited by the agent, the first stating that test flights from Exeter at that time were very few and that there were only a few machines on the aerodrome. The second report starts with a claim by OSTRO that his agent had returned to England on the previous day. It is dated 14 July 1942 and states that on 11 July 1942 about forty-five aircraft earmarked for the Ferry Service were noticed at Exeter aerodrome, mostly Beaufighters and Wellingtons. Exeter aerodrome is not in fact used for the Ferry Service and neither the number nor the type of aircraft were on it at the date stated.
The last of the P Reports dated 1 September 1942 states that Air Marshal Tedder recently flew from Aboukir to London and points out that the 100 per cent reservation of BOA [British Overseas Airways] and KLM planes reported a short time previously had been for Navy and Army officers, including among others Admiral Sir Tom Phillips. It would have been thought that even a reader of German newspapers would have known of the death of Admiral Phillips when the Prince of Wales was lost in December 1941. However, the report continues undaunted that General Paget was seen off in a special plane from St Eval aerodrome on 28th August by various named personalities and claims that these names were confirmed by numbers of the aerodrome staff two or three times, independently of each other – afterwards. There is no truth in this statement. The report finishes with a statement that it has become known from BOA staff that many military personalities had flown to Gibraltar from West Africa, apparently for conferences. As it happens there is some truth in this last statement, but fortunately OSTRO has drawn the wrong conclusion from it as he adds a note that similar air traffic and conferences took place shortly before the last Mediterranean convoy.
(c) The third category of report, the I Reports, presents OSTRO at his most picturesque. The first dated 1 April 1942 states that a banquet was to take place on the 12th April at 4 o’clock at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, in conjunction with a great celebration in Birkenhead, Cammel Laird. Queen Mary was to attend together with other members of the Royal Family, the First, Second and Third Lords of the Admiralty, Churchill and high officers of all three Services. The second report is dated 23 September 1942 and stated that on the 23rd September the battleships Howe and Anson were to be ceremoniously commissioned in the Firth of Forth in the presence of the Admiralty, the
Government and special representatives of the US Navy, and probably of the King. These ships were to be employed in January 1943 for coastal defence. Comment on these reports is hardly necessary, but it should perhaps be mentioned that the Howe and Anson have been in commission for some time and in the words of the Admiralty ‘it is not intended that they should be used for defence’.
Hart’s forensic treatment of the ISOS decrypts exposed the blunders, and thirteen specific falsehoods, but he could not know that the material had received special handling by the Germans, and, because of personal relationships and his past service, had never been subjected to the same rigorous treatment. Despite his schoolboy errors, OSTRO’s reports were accepted by the Abwehr, so SIS made further enquiries, from the Czech intelligence service, and learned that the prominent Fidrmuc family was well-known to be very pro-Nazi. This additional item, suggesting that Fidrmuc was probably more than a mercenary opportunist, served to limit British options for tackling OSTRO and would later provide the circumstances in which the fabricator would accurately predict the Normandy landings.
‡
OSTRO’s occasionally accurate fabrications were matched by an I-L member of D. Hans Wagner’s Stockholm KO, the flamboyant assistant air attaché Karl-Heinz Krämer, supported by his secretary Nina Siemsen, and his assistant, Hugo Schaffner.10 They were known to have cultivated some useful Swedish contacts, among them a secretary in the Foreign Ministry, but SIS Section V analysts who studied his traffic, citing information from HEKTOR and JOSEPHINE in London, considered Krämer a fraud who invented most of his reports to Berlin, of which there were many, including sixty-five between January and June 1944 accredited to JOSEPHINE. In the month after D-Day, there were a further twenty-five. One signal from Krämer, dated 9 June, was relevant to FUSAG and the second invasion, claiming that JOSEPHINE: