Churchill's Spy Files
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Liddell’s damning analysis would be borne out by further evidence, including the interrogaton at Camp 020 of Hermann Giskes, the Abwehr officer who had masterminded the Englandspiel operation code-named NORDPOL. The statistics that emerged were chilling. Dozens of Dutch patriots had collaborated with the enemy, opening some seventeen radio channels to London, and many more had perished in concentration camps.
Much of the debacle could be traced back to 23 May 1943 when three agents, Anton Mink (POLO), Laurens Punt (SQUASH) and Oscar de Brey (CROQUEY), had been dropped straight into the enemy’s hands. All would be executed, but not before Damen had made his contribution by impersonating one of them. All three would perish at Mauthausen, together with Jambroes.
SOE headquarters finally realised the gravity of the situation in November 1943 when CHIVE and SPROUT, both Englandspiel victims, escaped from their incarceration in Haaren and reached Switzerland to send a warning to London. The grim news, that virtually every SOE network had been under the enemy’s control for the past year, prompted a furious reaction. Bomber Command, which had taken over the RAF Special Duties squadrons in August, immediately suspended all SOE flights across Western Europe on 30 November, having found an explanation for its heavy losses. Although the ban would soon be lifted on everywhere except Denmark, Poland and Holland, the RAF losses over the latter ensured the prohibition would continue.
On 13 December the Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, and the JIC secretary, Denis Capel-Dunn, assembled an informal board of enquiry to review SOE’s situation. Liddell attended, together with Geoffrey Wethered and Victor Rothschild, but the only SOE officers present were the organisation’s security officer, John Senter, and Eric Mockler-Ferryman, in charge of Western European operations. However, neither man was in the room when SIS presented its evidence, which was highly critical of SOE’s security in Holland and Belgium, nor saw the JIC’s draft report that recommended ‘closer integration’ between SIS and SOE. The JIC’s verdict went, in Churchill’s absence, to Clement Attlee, who declared the position ‘highly disturbing’.
Churchill would learn from SOE’s chief, Lord Selborne, on 12 January 1944, that his organisation had suffered severe hostile penetration and acknowledged that SOE ‘knew about the penetration’. Selborne argued for SOE’s independence, and his view prevailed, but the catastrophe would cast a long shadow over Anglo-Dutch relations. It is doubtful that the Prime Minister was ever fully briefed on what had really happened.
The RAF resumed parachute flights to Holland in late March 1944, and on 1 April the Abwehr, recognising that the game was up, sent N Section’s leadership a message gloating over their ‘long and successful cooperation’. This was the final proof of the enemy’s interference, and meant that in the weeks before D-Day the Dutch resistance was in no position to play any significant role to assist the Allies. Indeed, during the vital last weeks of May 1944 Dutch patriots were short of weapons, with no radio link to London. Furthermore, the only SOE wireless operator known to be at liberty, Jan Steman, who had been dropped on 31 March, was without his transmitter as it had been stolen from its hiding place where he had buried it upon arrival.
* * *
Code-named GELATINE by MI5, Friedle Gaertner was an Austrian living in London was already known to the Germans as a Nazi sympathiser who had been a frequent visitor to Joachim von Ribbentrop’s embassy in London before the war. In reality she had acted as an agent provocateur for the Security Service, identifying other contacts who were suspected of disloyalty. This had enabled MI5 to arrest and intern a large number of potentially dangerous enemy aliens on the outbreak of war. Code-named GELATINE because her case officer Bill Luke thought her ‘a jolly little thing’, she was to become a key double-agent, supplying the Abwehr with political gossip. She was in an especially good position to do this because her equally beautiful sister, Lisel, had married Ian Menzies, whose elder brother Stewart was SIS’s Chief. The Abwehr believed it maintained contact with Friedle through Dusan Popov who, of course, was himself another double-agent.
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6 JANUARY 1945
Petrie’s last report of 1944, read by Churchill on 12 January, and marked ‘Good’, would deal with the Allied preoccupations of the time, being, perhaps predictably, the enemy’s preparations for the liberation of German-occupied territory made by the combined forces of the Sicherheitsdienst and the Abwehr and, rather surprisingly, a very British case of anarchy.
DECEMBER 1944
THE GERMAN STAY-BEHIND ORGANISATION IN BELGIUM
Since entering Belgium the Allies have captured upwards of a hundred agents, among whom were many intended to act as spies or saboteurs in Belgium after the German withdrawal. Some of these stay-behind agents have been brought back from the field to our interrogation centre (Camp 020) for more detailed and expert examination than is possible in the field, and on their evidence combined with information from the field and from Most Secret Sources, it has been possible to estimate the character and the degree of danger now presented to Allied security by the stay-behind plans of the two organisations concemed, namely the Abwehr or espionage section of the High Command, and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) or Himmler’s special spy service.
THE SD
Before the Allied entry into Belgium, our knowledge of the SD stay-behind plan was exiguous, amounting to little more than the fact that there was an office in Brussels which had for a time been training stay-behind agents in wireless. Within a few days of the fall of Brussels, four of the principal agents of this organisation surrendered themselves. Three more were arrested, one as a collaborator, one on the basis of captured police records, and one on a denunciation. Finally, two Belgians, Pierre Sweerts and Arthur Garitte, who had deliberately established themselves as highly placed officers of the SD came over to us with a mass of information.
From those sources we soon obtained a comprehensive picture of the SD’s plans. We learnt that the order to lay down a stay-behind organisation had been given by Himmler’s Head Office in Berlin in the summer of 1943 and that the task was entrusted to two officers who, from our evidence, appear to have been remarkably efficient. Their scheme was to place a W/T agent in ten towns in Belgium, each with instructions to transmit some military information, but above all to report signs of discontent, the fate of the collaborator parties, the relation between the Allied forces and the local populations – in fact any information which might assist Himmler’s plans for promoting disorder in Allied occupied Belgium. The insufficiency of the Brussels office of the SD was seen principally in their selection of known collaborators as suitable stay-behind agents and their employment in that capacity of former members of the Belgian underground who had been tortured into acceptance of their mission, or had agreed to work for the Germans as the price of a reprieve from the death sentence. This policy resulted in the defections mentioned above. Farther, the Brussels office was grossly insecure and its secrets exposed to penetration by resolute characters such as Sweerts. Indeed, the only efficient aspect of the SD’s plans was the W/T training of the agents. On the sabotage side the SD’s plans were to establish some ten dumps and ten saboteurs, but it was not until November that we were fully informed of these and we owe our insight into this part of the SD scheme to the fortunate capture of a line-crosser sent back into Belgium by the SD. This man had studied the appropriate files in Himmler’s office in Berlin and was able to give us a full account of the sabotage scheme, of which to that date we had only known some fragments.
Our conclusion is, therefore, that the SD stay-behind organisation has been effectively smashed by the capture or defections of most of its agents, and the discovery of its main sabotage dumps, though the recent discovery of a further stay-behind agent acting as a liaison officer between the Canadian Forces and the Belgian Resistance Movement, emphasises the need for care. In the main, however, it will be difficult for the Germans to regain contact with such agents, and a far greater danger is constituted by the possib
le insertion of new agents trained in the SD’s special school as saboteurs, terrorists and experts in the art of disruption. It is known, incidentally, that some SD agents have specific instructions to cause disturbances in such a way that the blame for them will fall on Left Wing elements.
THE ABWEHR
The Abwehr stay-behind plans present a more complicated problem since they have been longer in preparation (they were begun as early as 1941), a number of separate offices had a hand in then. The position is further complicated by the substitution in the spring of 1944 of mobile control centres for these stay-behind agents. Further, we have captured no officer of a status equivalent to that of the SD officer Sweerts. Against these disadvantages we had, for some time before our entry into Belgium, a considerable amount of information about the Abwehr stay-behind plans, both from Most Secret Sources and free agents who had already been interrogated by us, and we now have drawn the conclusion that the ambitious Abwehr schemes have not really fulfilled the German hopes and do not constitute a serious danger to Allied security. Of the fifty agents identified in advance we have only captured twenty, but there is strong reason to believe that most of the remainder are already interned, or have abandoned their mission. The principal evidence for this is the fact known from Most Secret Sources that the only agents who have reported to the Germans from Belgium during the last few weeks are those under our control. Moreover, the extraordinary policy adopted by the Germans of selecting well-known members of collaborator movements as stay-behind agents has led to the arrest and internment of many agents on the grounds that they were collaborators long before they were identified as spies. Further, a remarkably high proportion of the agents captured had already destroyed their wireless sets, or clearly abandoned their mission before they fell into our hands. The principal remaining danger is forced by Abwehr informants who had been deliberately planted in Resistance Movements and may perhaps be still undetected.
On the sabotage side we knew that the Abwehr had long planned a ring of sabotage agents in Western Flanders and we consider that this ring has been effectively smashed by the surrender of the W/T operator and principal agent of the group, together with eight supporting members. Nearly all of these were members of the Devlag, or the Flemish SS, and would probably have been arrested as collaborators; none of them appear to have had any intention of working for the Germans after our occupation. There is, however, one further sabotage ring planned by the Abwehr office at Münster, the existence of which is known to us from other captured agents, but of which we have so far not caught any representative. The evidence, however, suggests that the speed of our advance into Belgium took the Germans by surprise before their sabotage plans were concocted, and before their agents were properly placed. No act of German, or German-inspired sabotage, is known to have been committed in Belgium since the entry of the Allies.
Our conclusion is therefore that, though there may be individual W/T agents and saboteurs at large, the stay-behind organisation has been largely smashed. Many agents may still be identified among those interned as collaborators. As in the case of the SD, the further uncovering of the stay-behind organisation is of far less importance than the capture of new agents which the Abwehr is preparing to send as line-crossers and parachutists into Belgium, partly with the object of regaining contact with members of the stay-behind organisation.
We have communicated the results of our survey to 21 Army Group, who agree with our conclusions and are in fact devoting the greater part of their resources to the hunt for line-crossers and parachutists, of which activities they have reported a considerable recrudescence.
ACTIVITIES OF ANARCHISTS IN THE UK
The anarchist paper, War Commentary, has been publishing during the last six months a series of articles dealing with mutinies in the British Armed Forces. The articles dealt with past events and were not specifically addressed to members of the Armed Forces. At the end of November, however, the Security Service learned that a roneoed circular was in existence, urging serving soldiers to join discussion groups in the Army as these discussion groups might form the basis for future soldiers’ councils. It further stated that an article would shortly appear in War Commentary on soldiers’ and workers’ councils, and that one of the most important questions was the action of soldiers’ councils in a revolutionary situation. Articles on the subject appeared in the next and subsequent issues of War Commentary.
As a result of searches carried out by the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, copies of this circular were found on the premises of Freedom Press, the publishers of War Commentary, and at the house of a leading anarchist, together with an address list of men in the Armed Forces and a considerable amount of correspondence from the Armed Forces. Snap kit inspections have revealed that the roneoed circular was in fact distributed to members of the Armed Forces, and the case will be submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
6th January 1945
* * *
Paul Sweerts was a Belgian SD agent who crossed the Allied lines on 10 September 1944 near Antwerp, gave himself up to the 53rd Infantry Division and declared that he had been recruited in The Hague. He was questioned initially by the 103 SCI before being incarcerated at St Gilles prison in Brussels, and transferred to Camp 020 for interrogation on 24 September 1944. Under interrogation Sweerts explained that he was a Belgian army officer who had been wounded during the German invasion in 1940. Upon his return home at St Josse in Brussels he tried to organise a resistance group but, anticipating his imminent arrest, volunteered to join the Waffen SS in May 1941. His motive, so he claimed, was to acquire information that would assist the Allies. While on leave in Brussels in December 1941 Sweerts was approached for recruitment by the SD and this process was completed in December 1942 and he was given his first assignment, to manage four Belgian agents. In June 1943 he was sent to Berlin for training and attended a radio course at Wannsee with Ramon Gamotha, a spy who would be a key figure in German subversion in the Middle East. Sweerts was then selected for a mission to Iran and given further agent training at Lehnitz, but when the operation, code-named NORMA, was cancelled in February 1944 he was posted to The Hague with the rank of obersturmführer.