The Abwehr interrogators do not seem to have been quite so brutal and they were marginally more proficient at the more subtle methods of interrogation than were their rivals in the Gestapo. The evidence suggests that German army officers regarded the task of interrogation with distaste and thought it was unsuitable work for decent officers. Several of their most proficient spycatchers were NCOs.
17. Cuthbert Skilbeck, a Chief Instructor, who, with Brooker, was the architect of the Security Module. (Hamish Pelham-Burn.
16. Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Bill’ Brooker, a Chief Instructor, described by Philby as the cleverest man he had ever met. (R. M. Brooker.)
19. Major Peter Folliss, originally Diguises Instructor, who later became the last Chief Instructor. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
20. Paul Dehn, Propaganda Warfare Instructor. (Hamish Pelham-Burn.)
21. Ralph Vibert, the Principal Instructor in Codes and Secret Inks. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
22. The School Staff taken about November, 1941. Standing 1 to r: R. Carr (Housemaster), D. Benn, M. Dobie, G. Morton, M. Bruce, R. Angelo, P Dehn, P Folliss, A. Enthoven, H. Burgess. Seated 1 to r: H. Threlfall, J. Wedgwood, C. Skilbeck (Chief Instructor), Lieutenant-Colonel Woolrych (Commandant), Major Palmer (Adjutant), Capt Parsons (Admin Officer). (Courtesy Mrs. Ann Sarell.)
23. Alan Wilkinson, who followed Palmer as Adjutant of the School. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
24. Bobby Angelo, one of the longest-serving members of the School.
25. Sir Alan Campbell, another long-serving Instructor.
26. Marryat Dobie, the oldest and probably the longest-serving Instructor; he served in the Intelligence Corps during the First World War.
27. ‘Pip’ Whittaker, Codes and Cyphers expert. (All Intelligence Corps Museum.)
28. Dorothy Wickens, the Commandant’s Secretary.
29. Phil Spriddell, Secretary.
30. Ann Keenlyside, Secretary, who also participated in Field Schemes. (All courtesy Mrs Ann Sarell.)
31. ‘Nobby’ Clark, nearest camera, with other gamekeepers at the funeral of King George VI.
32. Private Jock Flockhart, the Commandant’s driver, with the Hudson Terraplane motor car. (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
33.Members of the staff in 1942:l to r: ¨Polish Interpreter, Alan Wilkinson (Adjutant),D.‘Killer’Green (Criminal Skills Instructor),Captains Hornsby and Campbell,Captain Carroll (U.S. Army),Captain R Walters,Captain Lofts (Admin Officer). (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
34 Staff in June,1944:Back row,l to rCaptains Delves,A Drake, F Rhodes,Hornsby,M Dobbie, T. Howard, A. Hinde . Front row l to r: R. Angelo, R. Harris, R. Vibert,W. Smallwood, P. Folliss (now a major and Chief Instructor). (Intelligence Corps Museum.)
Chapter XI
WHAT THE GERMANS KNEW
How much did the Germans know about Beaulieu and how did they find out? The Gestapo and the Abwehr interrogators liked to give their captives the impression that they knew everything, but this is an ancient interrogators’ ploy. They were also fond of bragging that they had an agent located in a senior position in SOE’s headquarters in Baker Street. Were these claims justified?
The spycatchers’ dream is not simply to catch spies piecemeal and render them harmless by shooting them or imprisoning them, but to use them to obtain as much information as possible about their operations and techniques and, ideally, to ‘work them back’ to their spymasters to the point where the spycatchers take control of the spymasters’ operations. Our own counter-espionage agency, MI 5, did this very successfully to the German spies in this country during the war. It was known as ‘The Double Cross System’.
The Germans never managed to do the same to us on the same scale, but they did manage to take control of the operations of the Dutch Section of SOE for an extensive period at the cost of the lives of fifty-five Dutch agents before that Section became fully aware of what was happening. It was a feat which they were unable to repeat on the same scale in any of the other occupied countries, although they tried repeatedly and with modest success. They called the Dutch coup ‘Operation Nordpol’ and it is a classic example of how the Germans obtained quantities of intelligence about SOE’s operations and a great deal of information about the training of the agents. It was a ‘sting’ operation involving sixty German and Dutch personnel, among them collaborators who acted as penetration agents, ‘turned’ spies, about half a dozen skilful German signalmen to operate the very clever ‘play back’ of SOE radio sets and the use of overt and clandestine interrogation techniques.
Much of the information which the Germans garnered from this operation was handed to them on a plate without resorting to violent methods and it shows how easily the agents, many of whom were very young, could be tricked into revealing almost everything despite all the security training they had been given at Beaulieu and elsewhere. Many of the captured agents were promised that their lives would be spared if they assisted their captors and many of them did so. But in November, 1943, fifty-five imprisoned agents were shot on the orders of the Gestapo in an attempt to keep Operation Nordpol a secret.
Nordpol lasted from February, 1942, to December, 1943, and spilt over into SOE’s and MI 9’s circuits in Belgium and northern France. After the war there were bitter recriminations about the Dutch débâcle and both the Dutch and the British authorities launched high-level investigations into how Nordpol was allowed to continue for so long without the Dutch Section and the headquarters staff of SOE being aware of what was happening. Searching questions were asked. Why had the British and Dutch controlling officers failed to notice the absence of an array of security checks in the radio transmissions of such a large number of agents under German control? Where had the Germans obtained so much detailed intelligence that was necessary to hoodwink the Section in the first instance? How had they managed to break and use the appropriate codes? How had they contrived to use a style of language in the decoded messages which replicated what SOE expected to receive from their own agents? How had they managed to continue it at the cost of so many lives? Had the Germans been assisted by a German agent within the upper echelons of SOE, as they had claimed? And why had the Dutch Section’s officers refused to accept that the worst had happened even when they had received information to that effect from various sources, including the testimonies of five of their own agents who had escaped from the Gestapo? Two of these escapers had managed to reach Britain with the news and had warned their superiors of the Germans’ claim to have an agent within SOE. Why had their information been ignored and why had they been consigned to Brixton prison as suspected double agents? Had they been imprisoned to conceal the existence of a German spy within SOE?
The German officer who was largely responsible for the devastation of the Dutch operations was a 47-year-old former tobacco salesman, H.J. Giskes, a major in the Abwehr, who had been called up for active service in 1938. He had been involved with some sort of military intelligence for some years previously. At first he worked with the Abwehr Section of the OKW, the German High Command, under Admiral Canaris. In 1940 he was working in counter-espionage in Paris and a year later moved to The Hague to do similar work. In 1943 he became the Chief of Military Counter-Espionage for Holland, Belgium and northern France. He was eventually captured by the Allies and held as a prisoner of war until September, 1948, three and a half years after the end of the war, when, presumably, the Allies were satisfied that they had wrung him dry of every scrap of useful information about his wartime activities.
In 1953 Giskes published his memoirs and in them he mentions that in Holland he had been compelled to work closely with his counterpart in the Gestapo, a major in the SD by the name of J. Schreieder, who possessed the usual Gestapo powers over all other German personnel but lacked the personal experience and the trained personnel to locate and ‘play back’ captured radio sets. Schreieder had therefore been forced to turn for help to Giskes and the Abwehr for the ‘play back’ radio operators, without whose skills he could not exploit c
aptured wireless operators or run an operation like Nordpol.
The pair of them benefited greatly from the skills of the Abwehr radio-location service and signals personnel and also from the skill of an Abwehr sergeant by the name of E. May, whom one of his victims described as ‘a typical Prussian, corpulent, hair clipped, short in stature, never impatient, friendly, never excited and notoriously thorough’. May was not only a skilful interrogator but he was also an expert with British codes and security checks.
It has frequently been alleged that SOE sent amateur agents into the field to face the professional spycatchers of the Gestapo and the Abwehr. The fact that about 60% or more of SOE’s agents in Europe were never caught is sufficient evidence that the German counter-espionage services were not as professional as some people have suggested, especially when compared with the successes of MI 5 in this country. The reality is that the Germans were just as amateur as anybody else who had been called up for duty during the war. They had to learn by experience. Only in Holland did their counter-espionage services meet with a high degree of success, perhaps because of the exceptional degree of cooperation between Giskes of the Abwehr and Schreieder of the SD. Elsewhere in Europe the two organizations were bitter rivals and refused to share their information. Most of the Gestapo men had been recruited for their youthful devotion to Nazism and for their familiarity with the criminal underworld and not for their knowledge or experience of intelligence work. Very few of them were properly trained for spycatching or interrogation, usually relying on torture, strictly adhering to the orders of Himmler, who was Chief of the despicable SS. Those chilling orders stated that the enemies of the Führer:-
‘should die, certainly, but not before torture, indignity and interrogation has drained from them the last shred and scintilla of evidence which should lead to the arrest of others. Then and only then should the blessed release of death be granted to them.’
This makes Schreieder’s restraint in Holland and his co-operation with the Abwehr all the more remarkable. He is reputed to have been ordered by a higher authority in the Gestapo to accept Giskes’ subtle approach in the interests of exploiting the success of Nordpol.
The methods which they employed to catch the SOE agents in Holland were routine counter-espionage techniques such as the monitoring and control of all modes of communication, control of peoples’ movements, snap checks, using trained surveillance agents to do the watching and detectives to do the detecting, deploying penetration agents, creating networks of sub-agents, collaborators and informers, offering large rewards for information and encouraging citizens to report anything suspicious. But the most telling technique of all was sustained monitoring of the air waves for unauthorized transmissions, recording them and deploying radio-location teams to pinpoint the location of the illegal operatives.
In Holland, as elsewhere in occupied Europe, the Germans had sympathizers and collaborators among the native population to assist their investigation and take active parts as Nazi agents. Some of the people who assisted the Abwehr and the Gestapo had no doubt been inherited from the Dutch equivalent of our Criminal Investigation Department. Others were inducted by the threat of criminal proceedings for breaches of the numerous German occupation regulations. Using these routine methods both the Gestapo and the Abwehr had managed to catch a number of Dutch SOE agents before the start of Nordpol.
Giskes first successes came at the end of 1941 through his use of a shady Dutch diamond merchant and opium smuggler who volunteered his services as an Abwehr informer. This man, Ridderhoff, was a large, powerfully built individual of about 40 years of age, with a winning personality and a gift of worming his way into peoples’ confidence. He discovered that British agents had been dropped into a particular locality, were busy creating a widespread resistance organization and were looking for sites for air drops of arms. At first Giskes disbelieved him because the Abwehr radio location service had not detected any unauthorized transmissions. He discounted the report as rumour and told his subordinates to take their stories to the North Pole. Thus the origins of the name Nordpol.
In January, 1942, Schreieder’s men of the SD caught a radio operator, but none of them had sufficient knowledge to work the prisoner or the skill to play back the radio. That same month three Dutch agents were caught awaiting evacuation by a British MTB and the Abwehr radio monitors located and recorded the transmissions of a Dutch SOE agent. Ridderhoff’s information was therefore validated and the Abwehr and its radio location service were alerted and began systematic searches of the air waves for further illegal transmissions.
When the RAF dropped the first consignment of arms for the Dutch Resistance on 28 February, 1942, Ridderhoff was present, probably as a member of a reception committee. One week later the Abwehr radio location service located an SOE radio operator by the name of Lauwers and he was arrested and his radio set seized. Lauwers was compelled to use his transmitter under Abwehr instructions and, although he used his security checks to alert his SOE controllers to his capture, the officers of the Dutch Section failed to notice anything irregular about the transmissions. And so began Operation Nordpol which would not have been possible had the Germans not already possessed a great deal of information about SOE’s operational techniques and exact knowledge of the identities of the Dutch Section controllers and their methods of control.
By the autumn numerous agents had already fallen into the trap and the Germans were playing back fourteen captured radio sets which were being operated by half a dozen Abwehr signalmen who were able to replicate the transmitting style or ‘fist’ of the captured operators. Sergeant E. May had managed to break their codes and had knowledge of the system of security checks. Giskes and Schreieder knew the names and appearances of every officer in the Dutch Section of SOE, knew all the schools the agents had attended and knew the names and appearances of many of the instructors in the schools.
Some of the methods they used to acquire this information is revealed in the story of Sergeant Pieter Dourlein, one of the escapers who risked his life to bring the news to Britain. He was a young Dutch radio operator who had been recruited into SOE from the Royal Netherlands Navy in which he had served as a Leading Seaman in a warship in the Far East. Upon his transfer to SOE he had undergone the usual courses of commando and parachute training before being sent to Beaulieu. He had been parachuted into Holland with two other agents, Bogaart and Arendse, and a radio set, in March, 1943, a year after the start of Nordpol, straight into the laps of the awaiting German agents. On landing the trio were met by six Dutchmen, all of whom were working for the Germans as a bogus reception committee. The SOE agents were greeted with their correct code names and were treated to cigarettes and whisky. The suspicions of the new arrivals were only slightly aroused when they were asked to hand over their weapons on the excuse that if they kept them they would compromise themselves if stopped and searched. They were also asked to reveal their real names and, after conferring with each other, they supplied them, which was strictly against all the security rules they had been taught at Beaulieu and elsewhere. This request alone should have thoroughly aroused their suspicions. Already relieved of their weapons, they were separated and each was accompanied by two members of the reception committee. Soon afterwards each of the SOE agents was handcuffed by their pair of minders. Whistles were blown, more Dutchmen appeared and they were taken in separate cars to a local security centre.
Many earlier agents who had fallen into the Nordpol trap had been taken to a supposed ‘safe house’, which was in fact a German hide-out, and for two days were kept talking to members of the bogus reception committee about their mission before being arrested. The amount of information the Germans obtained by this simple ruse must have been enormous, especially if the ‘safe house’ had been equipped with microphones and recorders, which is highly probable.
After his arrest Dourlein was searched and taken before ‘a short plump German in civvies’ who immediately picked up a matchbox containing a false bot
tom in which was concealed the address of a Swiss safe house, and removed this information. At this very first session his interrogator told Dourlein at which schools he had received his training in the last six months, correct in every detail, and mentioned a number of Dutch and English controllers and instructors by name. He was sufficiently familiar with their appearances, mannerisms and roles to sound convincing. He casually enquired after many of the Beaulieu instructors by name as if they were old friends of his! He concluded, ‘We know it all. You see, we have our own people in England and I’m sure you know them too!’
Unlike the trainers in our Secret Intelligence Service, the SOE trainers never adopted false names or changed aliases to suite every occasion. They were known to all their students by their real names.
Dourlein’s interrogator seemed to know so much that by the time he had finished his questioning Dourlein was convinced that his claim to have an agent in SOE’s headquarters was true. After two hours of independent questioning the three agents were transported to the Gestapo prison at Haaren and handed over to Sergeant E. May of the Abwehr.
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