by Max Hastings
And what was all this stuff about the Ely constituency? Did Seth have political ambitions? After more messages from Germany referred to Ely and the prospect of a post-war election, on 5 December 1944 SOE wrote to Felix Cowgill of MI6, saying, ‘As Seth continues to harp on the Ely topic, we are still racking our brains for some explanation.’ The most pathetic victim of this farrago was Josephine Seth, still serving at an RAF station in the north of England, and utterly bewildered about the correspondence from her husband. She appealed repeatedly to SOE for guidance on how to handle Ronald’s messages, especially one asking her to open a bank account with £150. SOE minuted: ‘Mrs SETH states that in fact she has not the necessary money to open an account for £150.’
Seth persuaded inmates to send more secret messages on his behalf in their letters home, for instance: ‘5th October. From THUNDERHEAD [sic] FOR STS 98 HORSE GUARDS. FAILED TO BLOW ESTONIAN MINE. 8th October VON KLUGER SHOT HIMSELF. HUNS HAVE GOT THE FULL DETAILS OF OUR ROCKET BOMB TRIALS IN AFRICA. 9th October RUSSIANS INFILTRATING MANY FIFTH COLUMNISTS INTO NORWAY.’ On 15 December, in another long memorandum, Baker Street suggested to MI5: ‘we cannot help wondering whether his reason has not been to some extent affected’. MI9 eventually dispatched a general coded warning to all British PoW camps, instructing their inmates to have nothing to do with anybody calling himself either de Witt or Seth, who was ‘gravely suspect … [his actions] have rendered him suspect of collaboration with the enemy’. He spent his last months in Limburg in ‘protective custody’ by his fellow-prisoners – unable to move in the compound unless escorted by a British officer – until he was ‘arrested’ by the Germans and vanished on 11 March 1945.
With hindsight at least, it is not difficult to understand that Seth was playing the accustomed roles of every double agent, striving to keep two employers happy. Despite the comic aspects of his story, he was at the mercy of the Nazis, who would shoot him the moment his usefulness seemed to have expired, or his loyalty to them was in doubt: captured British, American and Soviet agents continued to be executed by German firing squads until the last day of the war. Seth’s only chance of survival was to convince the Abwehr and RSHA that he was an important person, hence all the references to his fictitious high rank, knighthood and parliamentary prospects. He displayed amazing ingenuity and thespian skill in sustaining this delusion. There was nothing noble, heroic or admirable about his behaviour. But who is to say what a man may do to save his skin under such circumstances?
Seth saved his best trick for last: on 16 April 1945, three weeks before the war in Europe ended, he presented himself at the door of the British legation in Bern, and demanded to see the minister. Ushered into the august presence, he said that he must be flown to London immediately, to report to Winston Churchill on a matter of the utmost gravity: he was carrying peace proposals from Himmler, whom he had met personally only days before, while staying in Munich as a guest of the SS, under a Dutch alias as ‘Jan de Fries’. MI6’s Bern station signalled this news to London, where it precipitated a new ferment. What was to be done with Seth? Broadway’s Bern officers said that he appeared to be sane. He was plainly acting with the complicity of the Nazi hierarchy, or some part of it, otherwise he could never have secured a passage to the Swiss frontier, and licence to cross it. No possible message from Himmler could hold any interest for the Allied governments at this stage, and indeed urgent instructions were signalled to Bern, to ensure that Seth was unable to discuss his ‘peace proposals’ with anybody, nor be questioned about them; but even the world-weary, or rather war-weary, senior intelligence officers in London felt an urgent curiosity to interrogate Seth.
He was flown home on 20 April in his persona as Captain John de Witt, and permitted to see his wife and children. He claimed to have expected to be received as a returning hero, having survived the most harrowing experiences. He maintained a persistent, manic clamour about SOE’s failure to produce a suitcase containing civilian clothes that he claimed to have left in its charge. He showed dismay, even disgust, when his handlers made plain that unless he could produce some plausible answers to their questions, there was every prospect that he would face a trial for high treason, such as would soon dispatch William Joyce and John Amery to the gallows.
Guy Liddell of MI5 felt that he and his colleagues must agree a position about Seth before people in high places learned anything of his activities, which could inflict grievous embarrassment – ‘disastrous results’ – upon the secret community. How could such a man have been recruited and deployed as a spy? On 22 April 1945 ‘Blunderhead’ reported for his first session of questioning by the security service bearing a medical certificate stating that he was subject to paranoiac tendencies. Liddell commented acidly in his diary: ‘from the sensational nature of his story this indeed seems likely’. Seth told MI5 that the Germans were still holding back some terrifying secret weapons for their last-ditch resistance, including germ warfare.
During the months that followed, he was questioned by some of the most skilled officers of MI5, including ‘Tar’ Robertson. They emerged from the process emotionally exhausted, in no doubt that Seth was a fantasist who seemed incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. On 16 May 1945 Captain E. Milton of MI5 produced a twenty-five-page report, half of which was taken up with cataloguing the obvious inconsistencies and falsehoods in the spy’s account of himself. Milton believed Seth had surrendered to the Germans almost immediately after landing; had never fulfilled any acts of sabotage; and had never been subjected to torture or a mock execution: ‘I think this information was invented by SETH as an excuse for many of his subsequent actions with which we might reproach him and also perhaps to justify to his own enormous vanity why he humiliated himself by offering to work for the Germans … I feel personally that Seth was badly frightened and willing to work for the Germans, even to the prejudice of this country … Seth was not maltreated by the Germans, because he told them all they asked.’ He had latterly been controlled by an officer named Graf Christopher von Dönhoff, who had lived in Kenya for ten years, but who now made a wise career decision to relocate himself to Zürich. The report concluded that Seth was ‘undoubtedly suffering from megalomania and would seem to be of long-term interest to the security services’. Uncertainty persisted, however, about whether he should be branded a full-blooded traitor, and indicted for treason.
Trouble was never far from ‘Blunderhead’. He was permitted to travel to the north of England to see his wife at the RAF station where she was serving. This compassionate outing prompted a baffled letter to MI5 from the chief constable of Lancashire, who wrote to say that while in his county, Seth had given all and sundry a wildly fanciful account of his adventures abroad, which seemed to constitute an industrial-scale breach of national security. Meanwhile, a passionate letter addressed by Seth to Liliane and written in French was intercepted and confiscated; it seemed undesirable for the SOE man to have any further contact with his lover, especially when her brother-in-law Richard was in the security service’s custody as a collaborator, and was under interrogation – not least about Seth. MI5’s final conclusion about SOE’s would-be Resistance chief in Estonia was that, while there was no doubt he had given the Germans far more active assistance than he would admit, there was insufficient evidence to send him for trial. It is easy to deduce that none of the secret services wanted this sample of their dirty laundry exposed in public at a time when the British people simply sought to celebrate the triumph of British virtue over Nazi evil. In August 1945 Seth was discharged from the RAF, in which he had held the nominal rank of flight-lieutenant during his service with SOE.
Even in the surreal world of intelligence, Seth’s doings were remarkable. He must have embarked on his Estonian adventure in good faith – why else would a man of thirty-one, with a young family, have volunteered to become a saboteur parachuted into enemy-held territory? Most of his own account of his experiences in German hands seems as absurd as MI5 judged it to be. It is most likely that,
having set forth from Britain with high ambitions to make himself a hero, once on the ground in Estonia a collision with terrifying reality dispelled such illusions, and focused his attentions exclusively upon dissuading the Germans from killing him. The shock must have been devastating, of meeting Estonians whom he expected to greet him as the harbinger of their freedom, a symbol of their future deliverance, and finding instead that they merely wished him to go away. The most persistent enigma is why Seth went back to Germany from Paris with his Abwehr hosts in August 1944, instead of making a break for the Allied lines, as he himself admitted that he easily could have done. The likely answer is that, by that stage, he was painfully conscious that if the Germans did not shoot him, his own countrymen might do so. It seems to the credit of Britain’s intelligence services that they treated Seth, on his return, with an understanding not far short of compassion. It was, after all, SOE which had dispatched him into a place of utmost danger, as it dispatched so many others.
17
Eclipse of the Abwehr
1 HITLER’S BLETCHLEYS
It remains one of the most fascinating puzzles of the Second World War, how a society as advanced as Germany failed to match the Allies as codemakers and breakers. Its hubs of civil and military power employed at least as many people as the British on signals intelligence – some 30,000, working in six separate and rival organisations. After VE-Day, interrogators quizzed their captured personnel exhaustively. A dramatic moment came at Flensburg, when one of the most senior officers of the high command’s Chiffrierabteilung – OKW/Chi, as it was known – was asked to identify his service’s most important achievement. There was a protracted silence. The Allied questioner wrote: ‘It became apparent that OKW/Chi had not achieved an outstanding success.’
They tried, however. They tried. Nazi Germany had clever men who strove mightily to match the prowess of Turing and Welchman, Friedman and Rowlett, of which mercifully they knew nothing. Those who know only the history of Bletchley suppose that Allied sigint success and Axis failure were absolutes. This they certainly were not. The B-Dienst achieved important penetration of British naval codes during the Battle of the Atlantic, described earlier. The Luftwaffe’s eavesdroppers acquired an immense amount of information about RAF and USAAF operations over Europe by monitoring voice traffic – aircrew talking to each other amid the stress of combat operations were notoriously insecure – through electronic observation and PoW interrogation. On the Eastern Front, the Germans acquired much useful order-of-battle data through traffic analysis and breaking field codes – the army radio intelligence service deployed six regiments in Russia. As late as March 1943, a Bletchley report on German ‘Y Service’ operations on the Eastern Front revealed them reading most Red Air Force traffic from their station W40 at Wildpark, Potsdam, partly because the Russians seldom troubled to change callsigns. The Luftwaffe accessed their two-, three- and four-figure cipher messages. An American pen commented: ‘What, if anything, the British have done to jack up the Russians, I don’t know.’ The Germans also claimed to have made occasional breaks into higher ciphers, because of Soviet wireless-operators’ shortage of, and thus careless reuse of, one-time pads. In North Africa, until July 1942 the Afrika Korps exploited sigint more effectively than did the British. Beyond the Germans’ access to the War Office’s W Code, captured in Norway in 1940, which thereafter rendered some low-level British Army traffic accessible, they also had the US Military Attachés’ code until June 1942, and later claimed to have broken into US Army M-209 field ciphers. Both Western Allied armies used radio voice communication carelessly, to the advantage of their enemies’ excellent intercept stations.
Never, however, did the Germans remotely match the achievement of Bletchley, Arlington Hall and Op-20-G in regularly reading higher ciphers in real time. It was their misfortune that the American Sigaba was a critical step smarter than Enigma. Experts believe traffic from the British Type-X machine might have been broken had the Germans laid hands on the appropriate rotors, but they never did. Berlin’s efforts also suffered severely from the division of its cryptographic efforts between rival armed forces and Nazi empires. The smallest establishment was that of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, Pers ZS, which had its own intercept station at Landhaus, as well as receiving some messages from OKW/Chi. Its leading personalities included Dr Adolf Pashke, a Russian and Italian linguist who had worked for the Foreign Ministry since 1919 and by 1945 had become Pers ZS’s de facto chief. Dr Werner Kunze, another veteran since World War I, was the senior mathematical cryptanalyst, who ran the department’s IBM machinery. Dr Ursula Hagen was one of the few women working in her field, supervising a group of twelve cryptanalysts studying England, Ireland and Spain. The post-war American report on the department suggests a group of reasonably proficient but relatively elderly specialists who ‘seemed overly preoccupied with cryptanalysis as a science, and apparently not … as a prime source of intelligence’. Pers ZS’s greatest triumph was to read the Japanese ‘Red’ diplomatic cipher until February 1939, when it was replaced by Purple. During the war its codebreakers broke some Allied and neutral medium-grade diplomatic traffic, but there is no evidence that its content was much heeded by policymakers, or even subjected to serious analysis.
German military sigint organisation changed so much and so frequently in the course of the war that it is meaningless to detail the variations, save to say that they did nothing to help codebreaking. At the outset Wilhelm Fenner of OKW/Chi, which was charged with creating Germany’s own diplomatic ciphers as well as breaking the enemy’s, was his country’s most influential cryptanalyst. Though Fenner was experienced and competent, his department suffered from his own delusion that he was brilliant. He was born in 1891 in St Petersburg, where his father ran a little newspaper for the German community, and he himself became fluent in Russian and English. After working for some time as an engineer, and then as a wartime army interpreter, in 1921 he joined the army cryptographic bureau, and scored an early success by breaking the Russian military attachés’ code. He introduced into the department an exotic figure whom he considered his mentor, a White Russian ex-naval captain named Professor Peter Novopasakenny. The two were soon reading most French and Polish codes, which perhaps persuaded them that cryptanalysis was not too difficult. Fenner later complained stiffly about the problems of ‘Haltung’ – ‘attitude’ – that were created by the Nazis’ ascent to power: ‘The restless times were not favourable for scientific cryptanalysis.’ Loyalty was esteemed far more highly than intellectual integrity.
The tips of Chi’s sigint tentacles lay in its receiving stations at Treuenbrietzen, south-west of Berlin, and at Lauf, south of Baden-Baden. The former was composed of two single-storey stone buildings surrounded by wire and sentries, the compound dominated by a forest of sixty-foot aerials. Inside, banks of operators manned sixty receivers in six-hour shifts around the clock, assisted by Morse-recording machines. The Wehrmacht employed some blind operators, recruited for the acuteness of their hearing, of whom Fenner noted approvingly, ‘the precision of their work was highly esteemed’. Most of the incoming material was composed in five-letter or -number code groups, and a good operator handled 3,000 to 4,000 in a shift, maybe two hundred messages a day.
The same routines were observed at Lauf, and there were subsidiary intercept stations at Breslau, Munster, Königsberg, Sofia and Madrid: in the Spanish capital operators occupied the extensive premises of the former Florida nightclub in the north-eastern suburb of Castellana. In 1941 Chi established a further out-station staffed by some fifty men on a German-owned cattle ranch north of Seville. This ran until 1944, when the Spanish authorities belatedly acknowledged the tilt of the war and enforced its closure. Further afield, a former Luftwaffe radio-operator serviced a one-man operation in the Canaries. All these stations teleprinted Geheime Kommandosache – Top Secret – material to Berlin, where it was sorted according to source, for discard or attack by the codebreakers. As at Bletchley and Arlington, only a prop
ortion of intercepts could be addressed, and some broken foreign signals had to be left untranslated.
During the pre-war years the Germans read much of France’s diplomatic traffic. A September 1939 decrypt provided OKW with the critical information that the French army’s incursion into the Saarland was only a gesture which required no transfer of German forces from the Polish front. For much of the rest of the war, Chi accessed the traffic from London of the Free French and the Polish exile government, together with some Swiss Enigma, and allegedly some Soviet messages, though there is no evidence of anything important. The German attack on the traffic of the Allied armies was complicated and weakened by the division between OKW/Chi’s role and that of the army’s radio intelligence branch, which eventually became OKH/GdNA, or Inspectorate 7/VI, to which a steady stream of Chi specialists were seconded. This ultimately deployed 12,000 personnel including its field regiments on the battlefields, though Eastern Front activities were separately managed, under an organisation named HLS/Ost.
Until Allied bombing of Berlin achieved devastating proportions in the winter of 1943, both the army’s cryptographic headquarters and OKW/Chi’s various ‘nation’ departments were located in the same district of the capital as Canaris’s offices, with the American Referat and Chi’s main HQ situated on Matthaeikirchplatz, the Balkan and English Referaten at 9 Schellingstrasse, and so on. Some 320 crypto-linguists were employed, together with several hundred clerical and administrative staff, many of them women. The evaluation department was housed on Bendlerstrasse, where officers created the same sort of card indexes of enemy officers, callsigns, units and warships as Bletchley’s. Chi’s codebreakers worked behind locked office doors, and none of the female clerical staff had access to safe keys. Ongoing rivalry with Göring’s Forschungsamt, chiefly a Nazi Party instrument dismissed by Walter Schellenberg as the minister’s ‘private plaything’, was a handicap. The latter’s 2,000 codebreaking personnel might have achieved more under a common roof with Chi and OKH/GdNA.