Churchill's Spy Files

by Nigel West

  4. A Trades Union despatched to various addresses in the UK/Eire copies of the minutes of a committee meeting at which measures had been discussed for consolidating the production of Phoenix and particulars given of this device. The single copy of this document which was addressed to Eire was intercepted in censorship. Arrangements have now been taken, devised by the Home Secretary and executed by an officer of MI5 to recover all the copies discreetly, and have now been carried into effect.

  Churchill was dismayed by the news and demanded more information, which Petrie supplied to his private secretary, Tom Bromley, on 20 March:

  The answer to the Prime Minister’s query in Para D4 of the attached report is as follows.

  The Trades Union official responsible for the issue of the minutes was interviewed in the presence of the chief official of the Union. The former, who is an official of many years standing, was in a state of great distress. He explained that his motive in raising the matter at the Committee Meeting had been to ensure that the work of PHOENIX should proceed as smoothly as possible from the labour standpoint. He made no attempt to excuse his error in allowing the minutes to go out with his remarks reported in detail. He undertook that he would never be guilty of such an error of judgement again.

  With the cooperation of the Trades Union officials concerned, the whole of the 265 copies of the minutes have been recovered and will be destroyed. The Union concerned has made arrangements to ensure an efficient check on all their correspondence in future, and Sir Walter Citrine is, at the request of the Home Secretary, drawing the attention of all Trades Unions to the need for the very greatest care being exercised in their correspondence.1

  In these circumstances the taking of criminal proceedings against either the Union or the responsible official is considered inexpedient.

  The return of this report in due course is requested.

  Arguably the most secret aspect of the Allies’ D-Day plan was the actual location of the invasion, and the Germans had naturally anticipated that any viable large-scale landing would require huge logistical support to handle the transport, food and ammunition necessary for such a major undertaking. The merest hint that a scheme had been devised to make the capture of port facilities redundant would betray a central plank of the entire project, and this was Churchill’s fear, and the reason for his fury at the hapless trade union official who, through sheer carelessness, had jeopardised the greatest military operation of the era. The Prime Minister was rightly concerned that, having been sent to a neutral country, other copies might fall into enemy hands, and even the most unimaginative intelligence analyst would recognise its significance and draw the appropriate conclusions.

  13

  3 APRIL 1944

  In the month before D-Day MI5 was preoccupied by SHAEF’s strategic deception campaign, designed to mislead the enemy about the imminent Allied invasion, and by the fear that uncontrolled spies might be infiltrated into the country on missions to verify intelligence reports from existing sources. Tension was high, as the invasion season approached, yet the Prime Minister’s report seems almost mundane, dealing with two Frenchmen, Henri Chambard and Jean Fraval, two unnamed Belgians, and a Norwegian, Knut Brodersen. In terms of double-agents, only TREASURE, TATE and GARBO are mentioned, with no indication of the crucial role they were playing in the strategic deception operation code-named FORTITUDE, arguably the greatest military gamble of all time.

  MARCH 1944

  A. SPIES

  1. Since the last report was made, four more enemy agents, two Belgians and two Frenchman, have been arrested. Of these, the Frenchmen are of the greater interest. One, Henri Gravet Chambard, is of particular importance as he was recruited on behalf of the Japanese. He arrived in the Argentine from Spain in May of last year. At that time it was known from Most Secret Sources that he had a mission to perform for the Japanese on the Pacific coast of the United States. While in Buenos Aires, Chambard was kept under observation by the FBI and is known to have been in touch with Japanese agents. He was arrested at Trinidad in November last while on his way back to Spain. The exact nature of Chambard’s projected mission has not yet been discovered. It is known, however, that he had been recruited by, and was working for, Angel Alcazar de Velasco, a man well-known to us. This person was in London in 1944 as the Spanish Press Attaché, a post for which his previous experience as a bull-fighter indifferently qualified him. He was at that time engaged in organising a network of spies on behalf of the Germans. Subsequently, he worked for both the Germans and the Japanese simultaneously. He has now severed his connection with the Germans and peddles his wares, which are mostly of a dubious quality, only to the Japanese.

  2. The other Frenchman, Fraval, is an air-pilot by profession and the latest in the series of agents sent to this country by the German Secret Service with instructions to join the Airforce and fly back to Occupied Territory an aircraft of the latest type.

  3. It is known from Most Secret Sources that a certain Norwegian is at present in Madrid, awaiting an opportunity to come to this country as a spy. He has already been supplied with money by the German Secret Service and, after his arrival here, a cover-address will be communicated to him by wireless. It is almost certain that the man in question is one Knut Brodersen, who has applied in Madrid for permission to travel to the UK. His journey here will be facilitated and suitable arrangements have been made for his reception.

  B. SPECIAL AGENTS

  The agent TREASURE has returned to this country after a visit to Lisbon for the purpose of meeting Dr. Emil Kliemann, her spymaster. She has received a new questionnaire from which it appears that the Germans urgently require exact information about the whereabouts of General Eisenhower’s headquarters; and that they are interested in the specifications of a new and apparently non-existent type of aircraft which has neither a propeller nor is Jet-propelled. The instructions issued earlier to the agent TATE, to go to Cambridge to obtain information about the points at which British and American aircraft assemble before taking part in raids on Germany have now been cancelled in favour of instructions to report (by reference to the nearest cross-roads) the position of anti-aircraft batteries in Greater London. The agent GARBO’s financial position has been further improved by another transaction under the terms of Plan DREAM, by which he has received £2,775 in exchange for a quarter of a million pesetas, paid by the German Secret Service to his nominees in Madrid.

  C. SABOTAGE

  1. The activities of the group of Falangist saboteurs, referred to in the last report, continue. Our representative in Gibraltar has informed us that sufficient information about their doings to form the basis of a protest to the Spanish Government may soon be available. We have advised that such a protest would be unavailing unless supported by specific and factual evidence. We have therefore proposed that the question of a protest should be deferred until after one of these saboteurs has been caught red-handed.

  2. On the Italian front the Germans are showing greater skill in the targets which they select for sabotage. The quality of the agents whom they employ remains poor. A fair number have now been captured, all of whom were Italians with little stomach for their work. The equipment which they employ is, however, excellent being of British manufacture. It appears that the Germans now employ exclusively equipment captured from British secret organisations. This includes such ingenious devices as explosive dogs and rats stuffed with plastic explosive.

  3. Information has been received from Most Secret Sources that a detachment of Himmler’s Secret Service in Russia has applied to headquarters for thirty bottles of poisoned brandy, thirty packets of poisoned cigarettes, an equal number of pairs of rubber gloves and a supply of dog poison. These accessories are presumably either for the use of agents behind the Russian lines or for employment against Russian partisans. They are an index of the methods employed by Himmler’s organisation.

  3rd April 1944

  * * *

  The mention of Emil Kliemann as a key figure in
the TREASURE double-agent case shows that MI5 considered him a significant adversary, and his capture at the home of his French mistress, Yvonne Delidaise, in Bougival on 16 August 1944 proved to be a major intelligence breakthrough. Arrested by the FFI, who were suspicious of Yvonne’s brother Richard. He had been extracted from his prison cell by OSS personnel, who had handed him over to an SCI. His name cropped up in numerous espionage cases and he was a highly energetic professional, travelling frequently between Paris, Madrid and Lisbon to manage his very considerable stable of agents. Some of Kliemann’s career was already known, either supplied by the double-agents TREASURE, DRAGONFLY, WEASEL and BASKET, or by the defector HARLEQUIN, or by the wretched Oswald Job. All, to varying degrees, were acquainted with Kliemann, and his interrogators were also assisted by lengthy statements from his mistress and her mother.

  Under an interrogation conducted by CSDIC and not at Camp 020, he volunteered that he was an Austrian, and never a Nazi, and had decided to cooperate fully with the Allies in the hope of building a better Austria. At the time of his capture he was finding excuses not to return to Wiesbaden where, ISOS had revealed, the Gestapo wished to question him about the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was kept a prisoner until his release in the British zone in Germany in December 1945.

  Originally a businessman in Vienna working for a wholesale grain merchant Kliemann, who was still married to his second wife, had been called up by the Luftwaffe in 1939 and posted to Wiesbaden as an intelligence officer, attached to the Abwehr’s Eins Luft branch. In June 1940 he was transferred to Paris, where he remained for the rest of the war, although his role changed from the analysis of captured French documents to the recruitment and management of agents. According to his large MI5 dossier, he was also a violinist who collected old porcelain, and suffered from a coronary illness.

  On 23 September 1944 Kliemann was flown from Paris to Heston, treated as a prisoner-of-war and accommodated by MI-19 at Trent Park, Cockfosters, where he described his work for the Abwehr, unaware of his paper trail in ISOS and the British control over four of his agents. His star source, of course, was the temperamental Russian journalist Lily Sergueiev, code-named TREASURE by MI5 and TRAMP by the Abwehr, but his first encounter with the recruitment and management of individual agents was with DRAGONFLY’s German sister, Lilian Rindermann, in Frankfurt in February 1940.

  DRAGONFLY was Hans George, born in London of German parentage, who travelled in April 1940 to meet his sister in The Hague, and accepted a message and a supply of secret ink from her in order to ensure his family’s safety, but immediately upon his return to England declared the approach to MI5. In November 1940 he went to Lisbon under business cover, as a wine importer, to meet Kliemann, who claimed to represent the German Chamber of Commerce, and receive his instructions. Having been briefed, and been given a wireless transmitter disguised as a gramophone, DRAGONFLY went back to England in the expectation that he would be paid through a commercial licensing scheme in which he would be funded by an intermediary company in Switzerland for the manufacturing rights to a cosmetic product, Trixale, This arrangement involved Kliemann’s nominee, Colonel Bertil Martenson, formerly the Finnish military attaché in Paris, who had moved to Lisbon. DRAGONFLY’s wireless link became operational at the end of March 1941 but in April 1942 Kliemann confided to HARLEQUIN that he suspected his agent had been compromised, although he did not submit a formal report. Paris maintained the radio connection until the end January 1944 up to twice a week, but DRAGONFLY usually demanded money. In an effort to send jewellery to DRAGONFLY, Oswald Job had been employed to act as a courier, but he was quickly identified, arrested in November 1943, tried, and hanged in March 1944. DRAGONFLY’s controlling station was moved to Wiesbaden in January 1944, but finally abandoned in July.

  Kliemann first met TREASURE through an introduction in Paris made by his mistress, Yvonne, in a café in June 1941, although he did not recruit her until October 1941. She completed her training in June 1942 but visa problems delayed her mission, and Kliemann saw her again in October 1942 at 2 Villa Boileau, 16 rue Molitor, but could not acquire the necessary travel permits until June 1943, when he gave her the address of a contact in Lisbon, an Abwehr officer named Morgener.

  On 17 September 1943 Kliemann met TREASURE in Madrid, accompanied by a colleague, von Buch, and she received a final briefing at a villa on the Ciudad Ordinal. Unaware that she had already contacted Kenneth Benton at the SIS station at the British embassy on 17 July, Kliemann sent her on her mission, and remained in contact using secret writing to cover addresses in Sweden and Spain until her return to Lisbon in March 1944. Over a period of a week they had frequent meetings, in a flat at 9 rue San Pedro, and during a day trip to Sintra, before she returned to England on 23 March 1944. Even during his interrogation, Kliemann never realised that TREASURE had worked against him from the outset, and his interrogators gave him no clue to the wealth of their knowledge so as to avoid compromising either her or ISOS.

  Kliemann’s relationship with the Irishman Joseph Lenihan, code-named BASKET, was rather fleeting. His assignment in July 1941 had been to escort him to the Château Buc, where he was paid £500 and prepared for a flight the following day from Brest to Ireland. In February 1935 BASKET had been convicted of smuggling for the IRA, and had been serving a prison sentence in Jersey when the Channel Islands had been occupied. After an unsuccessful escape attempt he had been recruited by the Abwehr and taken to Paris for a parachute mission to County Meath, where he was to transmit daily weather reports. He landed on 18 July but five days later travelled north from Dublin to surrender to the Royal Ulster Constabulary and thereafter was sent to Camp 020. He was eventually released with a promise of good behaviour as he could not be run as a double-agent, the RAF banning any suggestion of transmitting accurate weather reports to the enemy.

  BASKET’s role as an MI5 double-agent would remain secret for many years, and his Security Service file has never been declassified because of Whitehall’s sensitivity about the Lenihans, a family prominent in Athlone, because his nephew Brian Lenihan was a prominent Fianna Fáil politician who became Eire’s deputy Prime Minister, foreign minister and minister of justice.

  THE WEASEL was a Belgian ship’s physician, Dr Hilaire Westerlinck, who had been working aboard the liner Thysville, and was not much more successful in his intended mission to the Congo. He arrived in Paris in July 1941 but did not reach Lisbon until 15 August 1941, and landed in England with his wife in May 1942. Not only had Westerlinck’s assignment been compromised by ISOS, but his pro-Nazi sympathies had been reported by two other Belgians, Jack Verlinden and Albert de Jaeger, both later employed at Camp 020 as stool pigeons. His role as a double-agent terminated in December the same year, probably because he alerted the Germans that he was mailing his secret writing messages under British control.

  Although Kliemann filled in many of the gaps in MI5’s knowledge of the four double-agents, his real value was in his account of the Abwehr’s stay-behind organisation in France, which he estimated consisted of twenty-five transmitters, most of which were captured British sets following the bombing of the Abwehr’s depot in Berlin. He recalled the code names and the locations of many agents, among them OMI in Caen; BERNARD in Nantes, where he owned a theatrical agency; PRIMO, a 24-year-old garage mechanic; SECUNDO, a 26-year-old electrician named Roger Fournier employed at the Laleu aerodrome near La Pallice; a factory draughtsman, Francois Kretz, code-named JUX, in Bordeaux; BANJO, a half-caste garage mechanic named Megele from Guadaloupe, based in Rayan; Tisserand, code-named FLUTE, a worker in an electrical plant in Perpignan; Marcel Guillouard, code-named CELLO, in Toulon; ALTO in Marseilles; FIDELO in Cannes; Harduin, a former airman and taxi driver code-named PERCY, in Nice; and CALAIS in Saint-Girons. There were others established in Saint-Malo, Arles and Montpellier, with a separate Abwehr Eins Marine IM network in the ports Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, Lorient and maybe Quimper. Because Kliemann could remember several true identities and other d
etails, all these agents would be tracked down by SCI units.

  * * *

  Henri Chambard was arrested in Trinidad in November 1943. Aged 37, and travelling on a French passport issued at the consulate in Barcelona in January 1943, he was married to an Argentine, Maria Dou, and had lived in Spain since the age of 8. Between 1934 and 1927 he served in the Spanish Fleet Air Arm as an aviator. He emigrated to Argentina in 1928, but returned to Spain in 1931.

  According to ISOS, he had been recruited by Angel Alcazar de Velasco in April to act as a spy for the Japanese and undertake a mission to Guatemala, Mexico and California, where he was to establish a network equipped with wireless transmitters. While in Madrid his principal contact was Alcazar de Velaso’s secretary and assistant, Dr Celestino Moliner. Having accepted this assignment, and a promise of $5,000, he had boarded the Cabo de Hornos in Bilbao and sailed to Argentina. When he reached Buenos Aires on 11 May 1943 he was placed under intensive surveillance by the FBI and seen to meet a Japanese diplomat, Shozo Murai. However, within a month he was trying to return to Spain and, after many visa delays, he embarked on the Cabo de Buena Esperanzia, on 13 November bound for Spain, having spent most of his money and abandoned his mission.

  Chambard was arrested when he called in at Trinidad on 6 December and interrogated, but claimed that he had not been in contact with the Japanese until after his arrival in Buenos Aires in May, and that admission was only made after he was confronted with surveillance evidence from the FBI. He was sent to England in February 1944 aboard the Dutch freighter SS Maaskerk, arriving on 11 March, when he was escorted to Camp 020. When questioned by MI5 Chambard made a detailed confession and he would remain in custody until June 1945 when he was flown from Croydon to Le Bourget with Gabriel De Chaffault and delivered to Inspector Latruberce of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. In September 1948 he was sentenced by a French military tribunal to fifteen years’ hard labour.