Goertz wasn’t the only Irish card in the Abwehr’s hand by a long shot. A celebrated I.R.A. exile, Sean Russel, had been brought from the United States to Germany where a nucleus of other I.R.A. men were in training at Quenzsee. Since the Germans feared that the British might eventually occupy the Free State—or that the government would flee there if Sea Lion succeeded—it was important to promote an I.R.A. rebellion. A U-boat was commandeered to take Russel home, but by the time he arrived at the French port of Lorient to embark, he was a very sick man with an old ulcer flaring up. The Germans shipped him off anyway, but he had a hemorrhage and died at sea.
The Abwehr had a third important Irish link, this one in London. He was a prominent Irish businessman who claimed to have some association with the I.R.A.; he himself, however, was not a member. This man was sought to serve as liaison between his contacts in the Free State and the Abwehr in Germany, but, with the outbreak of the war, it became extremely difficult to manage this three-cornered operation or even to get in touch with him.
An agent was sent to him via Spain, with a set of codes and some radio equipment. The courier managed to get to London, but when he called on the Irishman, he so frightened him that this chosen leader of the Abwehr espionage at first refused to go through with his original deal. Using the effective argument of blackmail, the courier told the reluctant spy that he would be denounced to the British if he persisted in his refusal. Under such pressure, the hapless Irishman agreed to continue to work for the Abwehr, but he refused steadfastly to operate a wireless. Arrangements had to be made for other couriers to visit the man in London from time to time and pick up whatever material he had; they would then continue on to Ireland and collect more reports directly from the man’s contacts there. How effective this link became may be seen from the Abwehr’s own admission that “throughout the course of the war only a single Irish courier ever reached Germany.”
Important as this Irish loophole could have been to the Abwehr, little had been done before the war to prepare it, and now everything had to be improvised. Canaris found it difficult to coax planes from Goering to drop his spies in Ireland. So, early in June, 1940, a German sailing enthusiast, a man named Nissen, tied to Canaris by their common hobby, received a summons to report for duty at once with General von Lahousen’s Special Duty Battalion 800, the combat sabotage unit. The Abwehr wanted him to take secret agents to Britain and Ireland, and even to the Western Hemisphere and South Africa, if need be.
Nissen was given the freedom of the Channel coast, to requisition any boat or yacht that seemed suitable to him, train the crews, organize the missions, do anything at all, but do it quickly, for Heaven’s sake.
Then, as work on Sea Lion progressed, Nissen, still far from having completed his preparations, was called to the Abwehr office at Brest and told to take three spies to Ireland, on the double. He decided to make the journey by sail alone. “After three days sailing,” Nissen reported later, “I landed my passengers by dinghy under cover of darkness in the gulf of Baltimore, near the Fastner Rock in the southwestern extremity of Ireland.”
But though the journey was a success, the mission ended in failure. Nissen’s three clandestine passengers were two inexperienced young Germans born in South Africa, and an Indian ship’s chandler. They were supposed to make their way to England from Ireland, procure information in advance of Sea Lion, send it by wireless to Germany, and then turn into saboteurs. The Indian got cold feet. He conveniently denounced himself and sat out the war in internment. The two young Germans tried to get into England but they were picked up, and joined their colleague behind bars.
With failure piling upon monumental failure, the Abwehr grew desperate. In panic they combed their files and screened their schools, but all the manhunt produced was a single man who was able, willing, even anxious to go to England. He was a professional spy named Jose Rudolph Waldberg.
What a miserable discovery he was! At that time working as a stool pigeon in a camp for prisoners of war, he did not speak or understand a word of English! He was a trained spy who had performed well in Belgium and France, but he was overworked and now showed signs of fatigue.
Three more were turned up in Holland, one of them a German discovered by Mussert. He was Karl Meier, twenty-four, a professional Nazi, who agreed to go when he was told that he would be followed within forty-eight hours by the invaders, including a paymaster who would hand him a royal remuneration.
The other two were petty Dutch smugglers who had to be blackmailed into the mission. They were offered the choice of England or of a Nazi concentration camp. “I knew what it meant to be taken to Germany,” one of them, Sjoerd Pons, said later. “I was willing to do anything just to get out of this pickle.” So was his companion, Charles Albert van den Kieboom, a twenty-six-year-old clerk whose features bore the unmistakable evidence that his mother had been Japanese.
The frantic search at last yielded three more recruits: a thirty-four-year-old German merchant named Karl Theo Drueke; a young, slow-witted Swiss chauffeur named Werner Heinrich Waelti; and an enigmatic, anonymous woman. Like Kieboom and Pons, Drueke and Waelti spoke very little English, knew even less about the business of espionage, and agreed to the trip only under some duress.
The only intriguing figure in this little mob was the woman. She was in her early twenties, a bewitching, blonde, Nordic beauty, athletic yet graceful and feminine, the kind of unlikely apparition you see on the travel posters of ski resorts. She was as smart as she was handsome, and she had nerves of steel.
What was such a woman doing in this dismal company? Nobody seemed to know who she was or whence she came. She called herself Madame Erikson and said she was Norwegian, but the name was an alias, and the fact that she spoke English without a trace of an accent belied her Norwegian nationality. Her companions knew nothing about her, not even her alias. They referred to her as the Fraulein, but they treated her with a healthy respect, for there was no doubt that Fraulein was the boss.
Now Admiral Canaris had his handful of spies—six men and one woman versus England. Even in espionage, this would not necessarily mean an uneven struggle. Sometimes an exceptional spy can score fantastic successes single-handed, but there was nothing exceptional about this particular crew except for their complete unsuitability. Only utter desperation on the part of the Abwehr can explain the selection of these Sad Sacks.
Lord Jowitt, who came to know these people better than anyone else either in Germany or in England, could only say, “If the cases of which I had experience were a fair sample of German espionage, then that espionage must have been remarkably inefficient.”
The Abwehr had no time to be finicky. Kieboom, Pons and Meier were taken to Brussels. The two Dutchmen were put up in a small boarding house, but Meier, who was a volunteer, was settled in style at the Hotel Metropole. They were given a month’s training in the handling of a special wireless transmitter and in Morse code. Meier’s training went a bit further than that. As he himself described it, “They gave me lessons in the structure of the English Army—divisions and brigades, what they are formed of, what were important things to tell; for instance, where battalions were situated and how we could recognize them. Go to the cafe and listen, for soldiers always talk. Make friends. There were more things than that; if you see tanks or something pass, give their exact number if possible; also about troops marching through towns, remember their direction and destination.”
The seven spies were split into two groups: Waldberg, Meier, Kieboom and Pons were to go to the south of England. Scotland was chosen as the destination for Drueke, Waelti and the woman. On September 2, the first group was ready to leave. Waldberg was “to find out what divisions and brigades were on the south coast, what were the nature of the fortifications, and what were the type of guns, both coast artillery and anti-aircraft artillery.” Meier was to collect information about the economic situation and the morale of the people, but also information about the R.A.F. Kieboom and Pons were told to snoop in
a general way: “How the people is living,” as Pons put it in his inimitable English, “how many soldiers there are, and all the things.”
They were to report their findings by wireless between five and eight in the morning, and eight and two at night. At last, they were handed their gear, put aboard a fishing boat and ferried across. They rowed the last part of the way in dinghies and landed in the area of Romney Marsh. By 4:00 a.m., they were all ashore and Waldberg rigged up an aerial between a tree and a bush, got out his wireless set, and signaled to his employers, “Arrived safely, document destroyed.”
A few hours later, he sent still another message, but it was no longer triumphant. It read, “Meier prisoner, English police searching for me, am cornered, situation difficult.” He somehow felt the jig was up because he concluded the message with a pathetic “Long live Germany.”
Waldberg started the chain reaction that led to their doom by becoming thirsty. Since he could not speak English, Meier had to go to fetch him a drink—some cider, if possible. Meier made his way to nearby Lydd, found a pub and asked the woman inside for some cider and cigarettes. The proprietress was no fool; she recognized Meier for a bloody foreigner at once, because, you see, it was only nine o’clock in the morning, before the legal opening hour. Meier was told to come back later, and when he returned at ten o’clock, he found an official waiting for him. At the Lydd police station, he conceded that he had just landed from a boat, but insisted he was a Dutch subject and had come from France to join the new Dutch resistance organization. He said nothing about Waldberg, and the British had to find his partner through their own efforts. It did not take them long. Early in the morning of the next day (September 4), Waldberg’s thirst drew him out of his hideout and straight into the arms of the police.
The downfall of Kieboom and Pons was even more abrupt. They landed near Hythe shortly after 5 a.m. on September 3, ignorant of the fact that a unit of the Somerset Light Infantry was stationed nearby. At five o’clock sharp, Private Tollervey saw the silhouette of a man on the far side of a road. He challenged the elusive shadow and that did the trick. Kieboom came forward and surrendered.
At 5:25 a.m., another soldier caught Pons, quite literally with his pants down. Pons was engaged in exchanging his soaking wet trousers for a dry pair. He gave himself up before he could finish buttoning up his pants.
Waldberg and Meier died on the scaffold together at Pentonville on December 10, 1940. They were followed by Kieboom a week later. Pons was acquitted and survived the adventure.
The British promptly exploited the coup by putting a lively new tune on their carillon. Contrary to the usual practice, they immediately announced the capture of the spies, and even went so far as to release pictures of their precious wireless sets. They wanted to give the impression that these were the first such sets to fall into their hands, and thus to quash any possible suspicion that they were operating those sets that had been captured earlier.
While previously their carillon had worked but sluggishly, now the British opened up with a flood of information to make the Germans think the old network was working well again. The British put on the air an intricate pattern of fake information, including a few items larded with some truth. The Abwehr swallowed everything gluttonously and rejoiced that the famine had ended. After that, much of the German High Command’s planning for Sea Lion was based on intelligence they received from the Abwehr, which in turn had procured it from British Intelligence.
D-Day for Sea Lion had to be postponed until October, and since the second batch of spies, Drueke, Waelti and the woman, had finished their training, the Abwehr decided to send them to London via Scotland. Drueke and Waelti were shipped off to Norway where they reported to the “Fraulein.” At dawn on September 30, the three of them boarded a seaplane and flew to a point in the North Sea off the Banffshire coast. They transferred to a dinghy, but had to wade ashore, because the water was too shallow for their rubber boat. The fact that they had to set wet feet on British soil was to hasten their downfall.
When they reached land, they realized they did not know where they were. Such ignorance is not conducive to an agent’s survival. They were to operate separately anyway, so they decided to grope their separate ways to inhabited places. Following his luminous compass, Waelti walked to a nearby whistle stop on the Aberdeen-Edinburgh line.
Drueke and the woman made their way to another railway station. As a security measure, the British had removed all signs from the train stations, and so this wayward couple had to ask the stationmaster where they were! The official told them this was Port Gordon, whereupon Drueke stepped to a timetable on the wall, picked a station at random, and whispered to his companion to buy two tickets for Forres. The peculiar conduct of these strangers induced the stationmaster to put in a call to the police. A few minutes later, Constable Grieve ambled in to ask a few questions. His inquiry was soon continued by Inspector Simpson at the stationhouse and it brought forth a strange assortment of clues: a Mauser with six rounds in its magazine, nineteen additional rounds in Drueke’s overcoat, a flashlight marked “Made in Bohemia,” a few other incriminating odds and ends and a sausage with the German brand name on it.
Simpson locked the pair up and called Special Branch in London. He told about Drueke and described the girl, who looked prettier than ever in her neatly cut two-piece suit, except that her elegance was somewhat marred by wet shoes and stockings.
When the man at the other end of the wire heard the girl’s description, he turned to another employee. “She has arrived,” he said. The other leaned back in his swivel chair and a broad smile came over his face. He merely replied, “Great work.”
What was behind that cryptic exchange the British still refuse to say, except for Lord Jowitt’s laconic remark that “it may be [Madame Erikson] was able to be of some use to our authorities.” In point of fact, she was a British agent who had been insinuated into the Abwehr in the hope that she would guide German spies into the arms of the British authorities, as she did, most successfully.
In the meantime, Waelti managed to reach Edinburgh by way of Buckpool and Buckie. He arrived at five o’clock in the afternoon, checked his baggage and went to get a haircut and see a motion picture. He had time on his hands. He was to meet his contact—a man in a gray flannel suit with a scar on his forehead—the following morning at Victoria Station in London.
While Waelti was at the cinema, Inspector Sutherland of the Edinburgh Special Branch, acting on a tip from the Erikson woman, picked up his trail. He opened the suitcases left by the young Swiss in the baggage room and found in them a complete espionage laboratory. When Waelti returned to the baggage room, he suddenly felt on either side of him two big men, one of them catching his hand as it was moving quickly toward his hip pocket. It was evident that Waelti would have been willing to fight for his life. As it was, he had to go to the scaffold in Wandsworth Prison in August, 1941, without a struggle, accompanied only by his partner in misfortune, Drueke. Madame Erikson was unable to attend the executions. She was extremely busy elsewhere.
After Waelti’s downfall and as long as Sea Lion was alive, the bulk of the information the Abwehr received from England was sent out by British Intelligence. As time went on, the artificial fog in which the Germans were wrapped became increasingly dense, until the Abwehr lost all sense of direction. As more and more doctored intelligence arrived from England, the size of Britain’s defenses appeared increasingly great while Germany’s chance for success seemed smaller and smaller.
The first victim of the Abwehr’s gullibility was the High Command’s Department of Foreign Armies-West which was supposed to develop the enemy’s order of battle. On the eve of the first Sea Lion D-Day, the Department estimated that Britain had a total of thirty-five divisions available for her defense, of which sixteen had been deployed along the coast and nineteen kept in strategic reserve. In actual fact, Britain had only twenty-six divisions altogether. The German agents reported that British ground forces totaled
one million, six hundred and forty thousand officers and men, while in reality their real strength was still below the million mark.
The inflated figures could not fail to influence the High Command, but it soon became evident that the increasing German uncertainty was due to something more than fear of just the usual risk involved in such an ambitious enterprise. Behind the mounting Nazi apprehension was a big lie, a lie so monumental, indeed, that it aided in the defeat of one of history’s most ambitious military ventures even before it could start.
Lies may be dead and damned, and rumor may be what Shakespeare called it, nothing but long-tongued, babbling gossip, but in times of war, lies are powerful weapons in the arsenals of secret services. All secret services have special branches whose wartime job is to concoct lies and to spread useful rumors.
On a summer day in 1940, a young man of twenty-eight, working at humdrum intelligence jobs in the War Office in London, was called to the office of “Paddy” Beaumont-Nesbitt. The young man was John Baker White, a junior major in MI. He was ordered to conduct psychological warfare, not against the Germans in general, but specifically against the German Army.
Baker White was sent to lovely St. Margaret’s Bay near Dover to see for himself what Britain had in tangible weapons. The Sea Lion scare was at its height and what Baker White found made his heart sink. The beach was defended by a rifle company with two Bren guns and an old Vickers machine gun. Their supporting artillery consisted of a few ancient French 75mm guns, with only ten rounds of ammunition for each gun. Behind that thin line there was nothing else for twenty miles. “We’re damn thin on the ground,” an officer told him; Baker White thought it was a masterly understatement.
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