by Nigel West
It would seem out of the question to use PUPPET’s secret ink letters with this object in view, particularly now when reports through Abwehr channels, if they reach the top at all, go to Kaltenbrunner or Himmler, rather than to the OKW.
If PUPPET’s use for deceptive purposes has come to an end, the case is not likely to develop in fresh directions, such as taking a political turn, because thanks to the fact that the enemy can communicate with PUPPET only through HAMLET, who is persona non grata with the Abwehr and will be even less popular with the RSHA on racial grounds, they are unlikely to seek to give delicate political instructions to PUPPET.
My recommendation therefore is that PUPPET should continue to write not too frequently for such period as SHAEF consider desirable in order to support his past letters putting across Plan PREMIUM, and that, as soon as this period is over, serious consideration should be given to closing the case.
The HAMLET–PUPPET–MULLET case finally petered out in September 1944 when it proved impossible to perpetuate the Ministry of Supply’s artificial interest in Koessler’s inventions, and the final chapter proved to be the interrogation of Abwehr personnel in Brussels, who expressed their reservations about Koessler but were never entirely certain he had remained loyal to the Reich.
* * *
METEOR was Eugn Sostaric, a Croatian naval pilot and aide-de-camp to the King of Yugoslavia, who had been in contact with his friend Dusan Popov from November 1943. He had been the King of Yugoslavia’s ADC, but had been imprisoned after attempting to escape the German occupation via Salonika. On that occasion Sostaric, who had intended to offer his services to the RAF, had been betrayed and sentenced to death. The intervention of Ivo Popov had saved his life, having persuaded Johnnie Jebsen that Sostaric, who was a strongly anti-Communist Croatian, would make an ideal agent. Eventually the Abwehr authorised Sostaric’s release and his travel across Europe to Madrid, where he was received at the British embassy. Further delays were experienced while Sostaric waited in Gibraltar for transport to England and then, upon his arrival, while he underwent a security screening at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth. Finally, in April 1943, the airman was enrolled into Popov’s network as METEOR, but there was an unexpected twist to his case. When Sostaric was introduced to MI5 he cheerfully revealed that he had been instructed by the Abwehr to confess his espionage to the British authorities at the first opportunity. He was to admit that he had been provided with a cover address in Portugal to which he was supposed to send apparently innocuous letters, in which messages were to be written in secret ink. Furthermore, the Germans had told him that, having admitted all this, he was to pretend to cooperate with MI5, and then proceed to correspond with another postbox, this time in Madrid, in a secret ink made from another formula that was to be withheld from the British. The Abwehr’s clear intention was to run Sostaric as a triple-cross. Sostaric neatly sabotaged the scheme by disclosing it in its entirety, and it was left to MI5’s Ian Wilson, who was appointed his case officer, to devise two separate texts for enemy consumption. The first was to contain material that the Germans would perceive to be false, while the second would contain what the Abwehr were calculating on being an authentic report that they could rely upon. Astonishingly, this charade was maintained without a hitch until May 1944 when Sostaric was posted to the Mediterranean theatre as a liaison officer to the Allied Commander-in-Chief’s staff.
3
THIRD REPORT,
1 JUNE 1943
The Director-General’s third report included mention of eight individuals, and an update on the fate of Rogeiro de Menezes, the Portuguese diplomat caught by MI5 and prosecuted.
The eight consisted of Jean Huysmans, who had been bundled aboard a flight to England for interrogation at Camp 020, quickly followed by his wife, who was accommodated at Holloway prison. He had been identified as an agent referred to in ISOS traffic as ‘Jean Legrand’ and ‘Jean Latour’, and promptly confessed when confronted with the weight of evidence against him. He would remain at Ham for the rest of the war, acting as a stool pigeon.
Three were interdicted at Trinidad while en route to South America, and redirected to Camp 020. Of this arrest, Liddell gave more details in his diary:
The Spanish vessel Cabo de Buena Esperanza has just left Bilbao for South America carrying two German agents. One is a member of the crew, a Spaniard named Joachim Baticon, who has already acted on several occasions as courier for the Germans, and wrote a letter which was found on the agent Andrés Blay, introducing him to a contact in South America. The other, Hans Laski, was travelling on a Spanish temporary passport in the guise of a German-Jewish refugee. Arrangements have been made to have both of these men arrested at Trinidad.
Thus Baticon had betrayed himself by writing a letter of introduction for Dr Andrés Pigrau Blay, an important Abwehr Einz Marine agent arrested in Trinidad in October 1942. Blay had been the Paraguayan consul in Barcelona but had been recruited by an Abwehr acquaintance, his German counterpart Horst Müller. When Blay was interrogated at Latchmere House he made a detailed statement and explained how his recruitment had been conducted by Müller and his colleague Friedrich Ruggeburg, and how he had been handed a letter signed by Baticon, which he was to produce to the Spanish consul-general in Buenos Aires. Utterly compromised, he was transferred to Camp 020R for the remainder of the war.
Hans Laski was travelling on a Spanish temporary passport in the guise of a German–Jewish refugee, but he had been compromised by ISOS, and was arrested in Trinidad. As for Pacheco, he too was arrested in Trinidad, together with his wife who, he claimed, knew nothing about his mission for the Abwehr.
Sibart, a former French commando, arrived in London from Lisbon, but was tripped up during routine interviews conducted at the London Reception Centre, a refugee examination facility housed in the Oratory School in the Brompton Road, Knightsbridge.
* * *
THIRD REPORT
A Spies arrested.
(1) Huysmans.
Johannes Huysmans, a Belgian national employed by the German Secret Service arrived in this country on 17 March 1943. He had been ordered to obtain information about economic matters; he was to communicate in secret ink and to receive instructions twice monthly by wireless in code. Huysmans is an important agent and had been working for the enemy in the Low Countries since 1941. His contacts in the German Secret Service are extensive and he has proved a most useful source of information. Most Secret Sources indicate that he would be accompanied by his wife, but she panicked at the last moment in Lisbon and the pair decided to call the journey off. The Belgian Intelligence in Lisbon, therefore, acting on our instructions, resorted to a ruse and virtually ‘Shangaied’ him using the Portuguese International Police as their unconscious instrument. They subsequently did the same thing to Madame Huysmans who arrived here on 29 May 1943 and now awaits examination.
(2) BATICON, LASKI, PACHECO and Wife.
These spies who were arrested in Trinidad and brought here by us for examination have not confessed.
Baticon, a Spaniard, was to join a German organisation in Buenos Aires which specialises in obtaining Spanish seamen’s papers to be used by certain Naval and Marine personnel stranded in South America, to enable them to escape home.
Pacheco and his wife are a well-known Cuban dancing couple. They had an espionage mission in the Western Hemisphere, as had Laski, who is a Jew, and served in the German Army in the last war. A fifth spy, Lipkau Balleta, was also arrested in Trinidad and has just reached England.
3) SIBART
This French Commando was captured by the Germans in June 1941 during a raid on Crete and later escaped to this country. He was marked down as a suspect by our examiners. Under interrogation he admitted contact in Paris with prominent members of the German Secret Service Sabotage Organisation. He stated that he escaped from his German escort in the Paris Underground.
This story might have excited admiration if it had not been one of the standard and threa
dbare stories with which the Germans furnish prisoners who they have succeeded in ‘turning round’.
(4) VICHY SPIES
Two men, a Frenchman and an Englishman, have arrived in this country who were sent by Vichy to spy against us. Knowing they wished to go to England the French Authorities guaranteed a safe passage from France to Lisbon as an inducement to accept the mission. Neither man really intended to act as a spy and both confessed their whole stories on arrival. Their training was extremely rudimentary, but while part of their questionnaire would have been of use to Vichy France, other items on the military defences of Britain would seem to show that the Germans had a hand in the affair.
(5) MENEZES
The death sentence on this German spy, formerly employed in the Portuguese Embassy in London, has been commuted by the Home Secretary to one of penal servitude for life. In return for this act of clemency our own Foreign Office should be in a position to drive a hand bargain with the Portuguese Government in regard to German agents in Portugal.
B Spies Expected.
The existence of three spies destined for this country has been revealed by Most Secret Sources. The first is probably an Austrian employed in a German steel firm in Lisbon. He will be carrying with him jewellery instead of money. The second is an agent of the Naval Branch of the German Secret Service, and the third is reported to have left Madrid for England. Arrangements have been made to give them a suitable reception.
C Double cross spies.
(1) GARBO
Before his arrival in this country GARBO, an enterprising and ingenious Spaniard operating entirely on his own initiative, double-crossed the Germans and induced them to believe that he was running an espionage network in England while all the time he was inventing his reports in Lisbon. Having gained the confidence of the German Secret Service he offered his services to us and was brought to here in 1942 to continue his work. Since then he has greatly extended his network of imaginary spies and couriers. We have now set him up with a genuine wireless station which has been paid for by the Germans. One of his notional agents, a South African, supposedly went to North Africa with our Expeditionary Force and has since been communicating with the Germans through GARBO using secret ink. Two more of his fictitious spies are sending espionage reports direct to the Germans in secret ink. We know through Most Secret Sources that the enemy believe implicitly in GARBO’s ‘spy ring’ and consider it one of their most important channels of information. His latest and most sensational coup is the arrival of new instructions for wireless procedure and a new and very complicated code. These were contained in sixteen miniature photographs (a specimen is attached) sent to him by the Germans, cleverly concealed in a tube of ointment and notionally brought here by one of his imaginary couriers. The procedure for wireless transmission reveals an entirely new German technique, namely to disguise secret transmissions as ordinary British army type. Through GARBO therefore we have discovered information of great importance to our own interception services. Nor is this all, for it is further probable the new code given to GARBO is used elsewhere by the German Secret Service, and is one which has hitherto proved impossible to break.
(2) JOSEF
Some months ago we succeeded in penetrating the Japanese espionage Service at its Lisbon base through a clever agent of our own of Russian nationality and OGPU training. He has now been instructed by the Japanese Secret Service to report on convoy movements, naval construction and possible sabotage in the Glasgow docks. JOSEF is now in regular communication with his Japanese spy masters through a seaman courier and the Japanese are proposing to use this courier to send a wireless transmitter and Japanese infernal machines for sabotage.
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(2) Recently the Spanish Consul in Cardiff sent to the Spanish Embassy details concerning air-raid damage. These reports have been collected by Spanish Consuls in Great Britain since 1940. There is reason to believe that this information is collected at the request of the German Authorities though the orders to prepare such reports were officially given by the Spanish Ambassador on the orders of the Foreign Office. We are controlling certain of the reports sent in, but in cases where we are not in a position to do this we are keeping a close check on the information which is passed.
E German spies collaborating with the British.
HARLEQUIN
HARLEQUIN, who plied us with invaluable information on the German Secret Service, has become once again an ordinary P/W. Realising that his only asset, his information, had been sucked dry, and that our interest in him was not based on personal affection, his flexible conscience began to give him trouble. He asked to be released from his bargain because it had become evident to him that the Allies were determined to impose crushing terms on a defeated Germany and he did not want to feel that he had played any part in bringing about the oppression of the German people. As the transaction, from our point of view, had been a highly profitable one, we placed no obstacle in the way of HARLEQUIN’s proposal. He thus put on his German uniform once again and returned to his former comrades in the cage.
F General Security Measures.
(1) The Chiefs of Staff have now empowered the Inter-Services W/T Security Committee to consider the whole problem of military and civil wireless security. The first meeting has been held and the Committee has reported back to the Chiefs of Staff that the problem is a serious one and must be faced. Ways and means are under discussion by the experts. It will be appreciated that the need for Signals Security is reinforced by the latest developments mentioned at C (1).
(2) The party of technical advisors from this office who were going to the Middle East have at last left the UK. The delay of two months in their departure has not helped the general security position out there. The problem of transporting them there speedily was one of air transport.
G Comintern.
Word of the dissolution of the Communist International first reached the Communist Party leaders in this country through the news agencies. Though completely surprised, the more alert among them were quickly able to accommodate themselves to the new situation, members of the central executive even asserted that they had expected something of the sort, since a message had been sent to the Communist Intemational as long ago as February, 1943, stating the difficulties which the Party is encountering from allegations of foreign control.
At first the Communist Party almost inevitably viewed the dissolution in the light of its own problem of affiliation to the Labour Party, and the Communists felt that the ground had been cut from under the feet of their opponents. Subsequently various Party leaders have speculated on the possibility of forming a Workers’ International on broad lines without the strict ideological ties of the Communist International. Such speculations have, however, been frowned upon, and the Party’s programme has been strictly limited to the immediate task of affiliation.
This aim is not as innocent as it appears. The Party’s record of penetration and fraction work within other organisations is already notable, Comments by the leaders on the suggestion that the Party should disband and seek election to the Labour Party individually show that they believe that the Communist Party has a distinct and corporate role to play within the Labour Party.
In the matter of the prosecution of the war the Communist Party still has a rooted distrust of the Government. Regarding itself as a watchdog for the Soviet Union, it uses its numbers to gather all political, industrial and military intelligence to which they have access in the course of their employment. Considerable information has reached the Communist Party in this way, but there is no evidence that it has been passed out of the country. It appears to have been mainly used to direct and influence the Party’s propaganda. In the matter of supplying secret military information, it is to be noted that members of the Communist Party in the Army have permitted their loyalty to Communism to override their allegiance to their King and their duties. The receivers of such information are well aware of the ‘illegal’ character of their activities, as must
be the getters as well.
1st June 1943
* * *
The slightly oblique reference to ‘certain Naval and Marine personnel stranded in South America’ deserves some elaboration, for it is at the heart of Allied concern about the internment of the crew of the Admiral Graf Spee in Argentina. The pocket battleship had been scuttled off Montevideo in December 1939 and the ship’s complement of 1,150 was supposed to have been interned. Thirty-six were killed in the naval engagement off the River Plate, but only 850 were repatriated on the troopship Highland Monarch in February 1946, among them only six officers, which meant the rest had disappeared. In fact, as the Allies knew only too well, they had been smuggled back to the Reich, often as stowaways, to re-join the Kriegsmarine.
The Germans had pulled off something of a coup by arranging for their men to be landed in Argentina, rather than Uruguay, and they had achieved this by transferring them covertly from the Graf Spee onto another German ship, the Tacoma, a blockaded Hamburg-Amerika line merchantman that had been moored in the harbour and had accompanied the warship on her final short voyage out into the estuary. Instead of returning the crew to Montevideo, as anticipated, the Tacoma unexpectedly had transferred them onto smaller vessels and dispatched them to Buenos Aires. Although all the Kriegsmarine sailors were required to be detained until the conclusion of hostilities, SIS and the FBI knew that some of the officers and technicians were slipping away to Europe with the collusion of the Argentine authorities.
One of the most valuable commodities in any conflict is experienced personnel, and the internees represented a very valuable, but wasted, resource for the beleaguered Kriegsmarine. Certainly between thirty and forty of the crew had been released from internment on parole, and had vanished, and the evidence suggested that the person masterminding the operation was Captain Dietrich Niebuhr. Previously the head of the Abwehr’s naval branch, Niebuhr was a highly professional career intelligence officer who organised an escape route run by his assistant attachés, Lieutenants Franz Mammen and Johannes Müller. In addition, Niebuhr had assigned to himself the Graf Spee’s only Spanish-speaking officer, Korvettenkapitän Robert Höpfner, for liaison purposes. Höpfner had fallen ill during his internment and had been allowed to work in Niebuhr’s office in the embassy during his extended convalescence.