International events were unfolding rapidly, with Hitler demanding the incorporation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia into Germany, while British and French leaders were advising the Czechs to concede to the Nazi demands. The SIS urgently needed information on how far Germany’s real plans for Czechoslovakia went. One source was the office of Konrad Henlein, of the Sudeten German Party, whose political dominance in that region was partly behind Britain and France’s feeling that Prague should accept its loss. Henlein had met Hitler on September 1 to complete the plans for German accession of the Sudetenland and, by September 14, the day Lubienski sat through the rally in Munich, he had instructed his men to carry out a series of terror attacks. The SIS instructed a local agent in Prague to burgle Henlein’s office and pass documents to Pack to copy. This she did.
On September 29, Germany, Italy, France, and Britain signed the Munich Agreement, designed to trade Sudeten territory for peace. The Czechs were not consulted. German occupation of the area was to be completed by October 10. In the fullness of time, as Pack’s previous lover Kulikowski had predicted during those romantic walks by the Vistula, Poland’s own claims to Teschen would be honored by Germany when it occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia early in 1939.
As tensions mounted, most British diplomats left Poland. Pack wanted to stay, but Beck had become aware of her affair with Lubienski. She would almost certainly be in danger if the foreign minister began to suspect that his chef de cabinet had been sharing secrets with her. It was time for Betty Pack to move on. It hurt her to leave Lubienski but, as she later wrote, this was “the end of my first secret service mission.”
Before she flew out of Warsaw, Jack Shelley told her that “the firm” would be back in touch. In the meantime, Enigma remained a priority in London.
In July 1939 Menzies, concerned about the increasing possibility of war, had asked Gubbins if he would use his contacts in Polish intelligence, which he had developed during his mission to Warsaw six months before, to discover more about Enigma. He had arranged for Alastair Denniston, the senior cryptographer at the Government Code and Cypher School in London, to brief Gubbins on Enigma. He told Gubbins his own network of international cryptologists included three codebreakers working with Poland’s cryptology unit. They were using “reverse engineering and theoretical mathematics” to break the Enigma’s Wehrmacht code.
Gubbins had discussed the situation with his contacts in Polish Intelligence. He was told to reserve rooms for himself and Denniston in Warsaw’s Bristol Hotel, long a favorite stopover for English travelers. Denniston would carry a large leather suitcase, suitably plastered with hotel and ship stickers, which would mark him as a seasoned traveler. Arriving at the hotel they saw in the lobby a suitcase matching Denniston’s in a pile of baggage. While Gubbins distracted a porter with his own luggage, Denniston removed the identical suitcase and placed his own in its place before taking it out of the lobby and getting in a waiting taxi. The driver was a Polish intelligence officer who took him to the airport. The suitcase contained a German Wehrmacht Enigma cipher machine that Polish Intelligence had stolen. In hours Denniston was back in London with it. After meeting with his own intelligence contacts, Gubbins caught the next flight to London.
On August 22, 1939, Denniston drove forty miles out of the city, with the suitcase holding the Enigma encryption machine, to Bletchley Park, the new home of the Government Code and Cypher School. Its staff were at the peak of their careers as mathematicians, linguists, and university professors who had taught Latin and classics. They were assisted by women who had been drafted in from around the country.
Rozanne Colchester was nineteen when she arrived at Bletchley and found herself working in one of its wooden huts helping to decode messages between Luftwaffe bomber pilots during the London Blitz. She would recall, “We girls worked through the night in smoky, claustrophobic quarters and off-duty we amused ourselves with card games and gossip. We were each reminded that if we talked about our work you could be shot. But it was all terribly exciting.”
That excitement increased with the arrival of Denniston and the suitcase. He carried it into hut 8, where day and night a guard was posted. Alan Turing was among the men who inspected the Enigma machine, along with others who would become legends in the code-breaking world of Bletchley: Gordon Welchman, Edward Travis, Hugh Alexander, and, of course, Denniston. A Cambridge University graduate, Joan Clarke, would soon join them in their examination of Enigma. Her work as deputy head of hut 8 would later be key in cracking the code used by the German navy to communicate with its U-boat fleet.
Two days after Denniston had lifted the cipher machine out of the suitcase, Britain signed a Mutual Assistance Treaty with Poland. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany and the Chamberlain government appointed Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty, the precursor to him becoming prime minister and forming a coalition government in May 1940.
On the day Britain declared war on Germany, Denniston told Gubbins he would need the “professor of mathematics type” to work with his codebreakers to decode the Enigma machine. He organized a crossword competition in the Daily Telegraph. Winners were discreetly asked if they would like to take part in a “particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort.” Responses came from chess champions, crossword solvers, and an academic who lectured on the esoteric subject of papyrology, turning reeds into writing paper in ancient Egypt. It had been one of the clues in the competition. Those selected were sent to Bletchley Park to work with Team Enigma.
Denniston also chose a number of women whose skills in the crossword competition satisfied him they would make good cryptologists. Within Bletchley Park the newcomers became known as the “Boffins and Debutantes.” The intelligence they would produce would be classified as “Ultra Secret,” higher than the normally highest classification, “Most Secret.” Ultra Secret messages were sent to the intelligence chiefs at the War Office, Air Ministry, Admiralty, and the Foreign Office. On Churchill’s instructions Gubbins also received copies over the teleprinter installed in his office.
The women would also download information transmitted from British embassies or traffic generated across the British Empire by the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless, Britain’s link with the world of business. Since the outbreak of war the company’s traffic was read by MI6 for anything of interest to the war effort.
Traffic that was decided to be “only commercially sensitive” was rerouted to the intended recipients, including banks in the City of London and corporations. Some of the messages were sent to Churchill’s war rooms under the pavement of the Whitehall area of Westminster. Those were read by Colonel Henry Bevan, listed on the bunker’s staff list as controller of deception. How he decided on the fate of those documents remains unknown to this day.
A month after Team Enigma had produced its first encoded messages, Churchill had described the transcripts as his “golden eggs,” and ordered they should be delivered daily to him. A dispatch rider brought them in a buff-colored box whose key Churchill kept on his watch chain. On the cover of the locked box Denniston had written, ONLY TO BE OPENED BY THE PRIME MINISTER IN PERSON. Churchill would read them in bed. In his midsixties Churchill slept little, his moods raced like clouds across his baby face, as he reminded his staff of the pace of Hitler’s victories: Poland in twenty-six days, Norway in twenty-four days, Denmark in twenty days, Holland in five days, and Luxembourg in twelve hours. Then he would smile and read out the Enigma transcripts at a Cabinet meeting. “Now we know his next move. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of his Nazi regime. We will never parley, we will never negotiate. We will never surrender.”
In their huts in Bletchley Park, the growing band of eavesdroppers worked through the night deciphering the meaningless letters and figures. Encouraged by Denniston, others tested all the possible settings on the stolen Enigma as they decoded the steady stream of messages.
Within months Team Enigma began to read messages from Hitler’s generals to their field commanders, reports on the position of U-boats, requests for men and material.
Strategically located a few hundred miles off the coast of the Carolinas, Bermuda had become a base for monitoring U-boats lurking under the sun-glazed surface of the Atlantic. A special liaison unit, SLU, composed of codebreakers from Bletchley, had been posted to the island. It was stationed at the Royal Navy base near the ancient town of Saint George. The unit’s members had arrived with their decoding equipment on board Britain’s latest and most powerful battleship, King George V. The SLU included a number of women cryptologists—in fact, the women outnumbered the men, who were mostly married, middle aged, and absorbed in their work. The women were young, single, and excited at the prospect of serving the war in a sunny climate while unscrambling U-boat radio traffic and plotting their positions. The information was sent to US Army Air Force bases on the East Coast from where USAAF aircraft flew patrols to attack the U-boats. An early success came when two U-boats were located carrying mines to lay in the shipping lanes out of New York. The aircraft spotted them on the surface with their crew manhandling the mines into sea. As the U-boats crash-dove they were sunk.
At their regular monthly meetings in London, Stephenson and Donovan had discussed with Gubbins how the Pan Am Clipper flights from Bermuda to neutral Lisbon could be used to the advantage of the SOE and OSS. The plane carried not only mail from other Caribbean islands but also passengers from South America.
Before the war those passengers had included German ambassadors and their staff returning for home leave and Abwehr agents from missions on the continent. All were protected by the diplomatic immunity of their passports. That protection had been withdrawn at the outbreak of war at the request of MI6 after it was discovered that Canaris had planted spies in British companies in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and elsewhere on the continent.
MI6 spies in Argentina learned that its government had been told by the Japanese ambassador that Japan planned to invade the Falkland Islands, long a British territory in the South Atlantic. The islands would be used as a base for the Axis to launch attacks on British merchant ships carrying supplies for Britain. The ambassador promised the occupation of the Falklands would also ensure the return of Argentina’s sovereignty over the islands, and the aircraft carriers from which the attack on Pearl Harbor had been launched would lead the attack.
On hearing the news, Churchill sent seventeen hundred British troops to the Falklands, telling Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, “It will be a serious matter to lose the Falklands to the Japanese.” Navy warships were dispatched from Gibraltar to reinforce the Royal Navy base at Port Stanley, the Falklands’ capital. In Buenos Aires the British ambassador, Esmond Ovey, had delivered a blunt message from London to the government “not to become involved in a matter which would end their neutrality.”
The Japanese threat never materialized.
FBI agents stationed in Bermuda checked the mail bags on Pan Am flights for letters with a suspicious address that could be destined for German intelligence. One of the world’s experts on secret ink, Stanley Collins, was employed by the FBI to examine confiscated envelopes. At his disposal was a 200-power microscope that could reveal if secret ink had been used to address an envelope and if the handwriting on a letter inside the envelope contained an unusual number of punctuation marks—periods and commas. Collins had discovered they could be microdots containing messages. It was a subtle method used by the Abwehr of sending secrets through the mail. Using a method Collins had developed called “hypermicrophotographic,” the microdots could be enlarged and viewed while still inside the envelope. Messages they contained were read before the letters were returned to the mail bags from which they had been removed.
In London, Stephenson, Donovan, and Gubbins had decided how the Pan Am Clipper flight to Lisbon from Bermuda could be used to unmask the clandestine activities in Latin America of citizens working for German intelligence. Their passports identified them as businessmen of various countries flying to Lisbon on business. Often it was to meet with the Reich Ministry for War Production at its offices in Lisbon to sign contracts. Their names were passed to MI5 and FBI officers in Bermuda to be checked against known collaborators. However, there was a limit to what could be done to stop them from using the airline. To go too far could result in a public outcry in their own countries and damage trade with the United States and Britain.
Using his contacts with Pan Am, Donovan arranged for suspected Latin American passengers on the Lisbon flights to be wined and dined in the island’s colonial-style Princess Hotel while the flying boat was being fueled. Their baggage was placed in a storage room and would be taken on board when the flight was called.
Gubbins had agreed a dozen SOE women—who had learned how to pick locks, open sealed envelopes, and use a matchbox-size camera—could be sent to Bermuda. Dressed in airline overalls, they were taken to the baggage storage room and began to open the suitcases and trunks. Once open, a case or trunk was carefully searched and envelopes and documents were photographed with their cameras.
The documents were then replaced in the same position from where they had been taken and the baggage locked without leaving a trace of tampering. The rolls of film were taken to Stanley Collins to develop in his laboratory. In an envelope stamped DIPLOMAT MAIL, the negatives Collins had developed were entrusted to the seaplane’s pilot. At Lisbon he would hand over the envelope to a member of the British embassy. It would be couriered to London by a Queen’s Messenger.
On a late spring day in March 1942, seven Special Duties high-winged Lysanders left Newmarket and flew to their new base at Tempsford. They descended between a gap in the hills and passed over small villages to land on the longest of the runways, which Jasper Maskelyne had disguised as hedges on either side of farm tracks. In the distance were Gibraltar Farm and several other farm buildings. All bore the hallmark of the illusionist’s skills: moldering thatch on roofs, windows with broken glass, barns with gaps in their roof slates. What had been a worker’s cottage had been left with only its gable ends standing.
Wherever the pilots looked as they taxied along the perimeter, the impression was of dereliction everywhere. An old tractor and trailer stood in a field that had been plowed as if ready for sowing. Hay rotted in a loft. Two pig sties stood empty. The only signs of life were ducks on a pond.
Watching them park on their hardstands was a tall young woman in a WAAF uniform. She stood beside a truck with a welcoming smile and said she had come to bring them to their quarters. She pointed out the boxlike Flying Control Tower, standing alone, and the other Nissen huts that housed the necessities of an operational airfield: the equipment store, meteorological section, photographic section, the parachute packers hut, aircraft maintenance where the ground staff worked, the sick bay, the canteen, the officers’ mess, and the quarters for the other ranks. Finally she pointed to the derelict-looking farmhouse. “Gibraltar Farm. Everything you will do starts inside there. It’s the Ops Block.”
With another smile she climbed back behind the wheel to drive them to their quarters.
On a sunny afternoon in April 1942, Selwyn Jepson walked across the lobby and past the sandbagged guard post at the entrance to SOE headquarters in Baker Street. His FANY driver waited with his car. In his briefcase were the latest files he had collected from Gubbins’s office of the women who had told him he was satisfied they were ready to be sent behind enemy lines.
Between them they would liaise with the French Resistance and recruit and build networks across occupied France, and teach the members of the Resistance how to carry out sabotage operations. The women agents would use their wireless sets to arrange parachute drops of weapons and ammunition and act as couriers, passing messages from one group to another.
They all had their cover stories and had demonstrated their mental and physical fitness, their linguistic ability, and all they had
learned about the L-pill, the suicide pill they each could carry. The capsule’s skin was insoluble and if swallowed would pass through the body without causing harm. Only when crushed between the teeth would the pill release the potassium cyanide, bringing instant death.
Jepson had sent copies of the files to Vera Atkins to review. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of wartime France, about travel, curfews, food, and fuel rationing and a multitude of other restrictions that would govern the agents’ day-to-day lives. Her information had helped to forge documents for their cover stories.
Atkins also used it in the lectures she gave to recruits at the training camps and the finishing school at Beaulieu. At the end of each lecture she would collect from trainees credentials they still had: visiting cards, Metro tickets, family photos, French matches. They would be added to cover stories, giving them more credibility if they were stopped and searched by a German patrol.
After attending her lecture, Jepson saw Atkins had a magnetism that he had seen in only some of the women he had interviewed. On that sunny afternoon he told his driver he would walk to Orchard Court, the apartment block where the SOE had provided Atkins with an apartment on the second floor. It had three bedrooms: one for Atkins, one that had been converted into her office, and one for her butler, Andrew Park, who spoke fluent French, wore a dark suit, and kept the apartment spotless. He used Vera’s ration book to do her shopping and prepared afternoon tea for his employer and her visitors.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 12