Dilly

by Batey, Mavis;

  I sketched my idea of an investigation of Enemy Intelligence and pointed out how necessary it was for me to have some say in the matter of distribution. The ISOS people and I now listened in to the Enemy Intelligence at four points and even if one failed the fixture was complete. But did it all go to the same place? There was danger of one Admiralty branch panicking because of cessation on another line to another branch. We must be certain that Cowgill and Birch were in touch and then we could use our resources to get the maximum general yield … I wanted an active effort to detect all other lines on which these enemy reports travelled and break the outstanding Kriegsmarine Enigma. I wished my personal scouts to have a large and unhampered range.

  This recorded interview with Menzies makes it quite clear how active Dilly still was behind the scenes, particularly in the ‘matter of distribution’ of the intelligence his ISK section was now providing under the cover of the ISOS section, which, as well as dealing with Abwehr hand ciphers, also undertook the analysis of the ISK Enigma messages. For security’s sake, to conceal the breaking of the Abwehr machine, the difference between ISK and ISOS was only known to a few. Dilly was not satisfied that Felix Cowgill, the head of Section V, the SIS counter-espionage section, was passing all the information back to Frank Birch, head of the Bletchley Park naval section. ISOS under its new head, Denys Page, would pass the Abwehr intelligence on to Cowgill at Section V’s headquarters at Glenalmond, St Albans. Birch in Hut 4 dealt with ULTRA Hut 8 intelligence but was missing out on the naval information that was increasingly coming from the analysed ISK messages. Cowgill was notorious for trying to keep ULTRA secrets under his own control, fearing they would be compromised, and he tried to restrict combined intelligence consultations.

  Admiral Godfrey, as director of naval intelligence, on the other hand, was doing all he could to promote the Naval Intelligence Division’s Room 39 as the ‘co-ordinating section’. He was getting increasingly alarmed about the Abwehr spying activities in the Mediterranean, revealed by GGG. Lieutenant-Commander Ewen Montagu, who represented Godfrey on the XX Committee, later confirmed how much had to be done ‘off the record’ and ‘under the table’ behind Cowgill’s back to get access to the deciphered messages. Montagu’s Room 39 colleague Ian Fleming was Godfrey’s personal assistant and liaison officer with Bletchley Park, which he visited about once a fortnight, co-ordinating with Birch. Dilly had worked with Fleming from the early days, when Godfrey was looking for ‘cunning schemes’ for pinching naval keys. He would have appreciated Fleming’s ingenuity and ability to get things moving, but we have no means of knowing what he would have thought of his post-war creation of James Bond and his fantasy world.

  Co-ordination over intelligence on the Abwehr was not only a question of gaining from joined-up intelligence, it was vital from the point of view of breaking new ciphers when messages were passed on from one network to another on different machines or ciphers. A ‘pass-on’, a message passed in one network in a decipherable cipher and then on the Abwehr Enigma, or vice versa, would provide a crib, which is why Dilly wanted an ‘active effort to detect all other lines on which these enemy lines travel and break the outstanding Kriegsmarine’. This was another name for the Enigma machine codenamed Seahorse at Bletchley, which was used for messages between Berlin and the German naval attaché in Tokyo. Dilly urged Peter Twinn to see that an extra watch was put on the ISK traffic to look for a pass-on. It was Nigel de Grey as Edward Travis’s deputy who was responsible for allocating new traffic and organising exchanges, which annoyed Dilly. ‘Exchanges were all very well’, he said, ‘but my attitude was, and had been for the past fifteen years, that I could not tell whether I wanted anything until I had seen it.’ Dilly also made it known that he ‘wished my personal scouts to have a large and unhampered range’. There is no doubt that Dilly was manipulating his own spy network from Courns Wood.

  Dilly was in constant touch with Twinn and was concerned that the ISK section was not getting sufficient feedback from St Albans about the new GGG traffic, but the time had come for Twinn to make his own stand. He therefore wrote to Travis on 4 May requesting improved liaison with SIS:

  During the four months I have been in this section I have had no communication with anyone outside Bletchley Park and left in the dark. We have now provided decodes of the whole of GGG traffic from 14 February until today and during the last fortnight we have broken five days of a completely new network but I have had no comment on the importance or non-importance of these two groups or indeed anything to show that they have been recognized as something new.

  A laconic reply was soon received from Travis to the effect that he had dealt with the situation with Section V: ‘I think things will improve.’

  Improvements there certainly were and Dilly might even have come round to conceding that Travis was an effective operator. Admiral Godfrey, who was still able to consult his greatly admired go-ahead predecessor ‘Blinker’ Hall, had undoubtedly been the one responsible for the change of heart about GGG at Section V. When there was any important movement of ships through the Strait, such as a Malta convoy, Godfrey arranged for a ‘rush service’ to be put into operation at Hanslope, which intercepted our Abwehr traffic, and also for disseminating the information derived from ISK’s GGG messages. We called our middle decoding stage in the process ‘jumbo rush’; this might have been because it was ‘rushed’ to us by Travis, whose nickname was Jumbo. We knew that action stations meant men’s lives at risk and working round the clock, but were seldom aware of the reason for any particular jumbo rush.

  The SIS officer Kim Philby, who had been a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, was now put in charge of the Iberian desk in Section V, with the task of watching and frustrating the activities of the Abwehr in Spain and Portugal. Many of us remember Philby’s liaison visits to ISOS at Bletchley Park from St Albans. Although he was already spying for the Russians they were then our ally and he was as keen as everybody else to defeat the Nazis. He wrote about his work in Section V in a book published in 1968, My Silent War, which refers to ISK’s activities and even mentions Dilly Knox by name as having broken the Abwehr machine; this was six years before Frederick Winterbotham first revealed that the breaking of German Enigma machines had greatly contributed to the outcome of the war.

  On the very day that Dilly Knox broke the Abwehr machine, 8 December 1941, the whole course of the war changed, as that was also the day that America joined the war. Churchill later wrote of his relief, after hearing the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that ‘once again in our long island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end … I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.’ Hitherto, it had largely been a case of keeping the enemy off our shores, but the Americans now urged positive action to liberate Europe. Churchill was not ready to embark on the main invasion across the Channel and instead proposed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Allies destroy Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Armeegruppe Afrika prior to an attack from the Mediterranean on ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’. The Admiralty would be much concerned with the safety of the armada of Allied troopships that would have to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar for amphibious landings. Dilly’s ISK section and its penetration of the German secret service messages gave Churchill the trump card he needed.

  Godfrey was determined to bring operations and intelligence together, which was the reason that Twinn’s protest about lack of interest in the GGG Mediterranean traffic received an immediate response. As soon as GGG was broken in February 1942, Dilly and Godfrey knew that it was directly involved in the enemy surveillance of the Strait. Spying on our shipping was at first a haphazard affair, mostly by telescopes on Spanish fishing boats or lighthouses; one message we received of a Royal Navy battleship making its way to the Atlantic reported its name as ‘Beware of the Propellers’! However, in March the messages began to refer to a state-of-the-art survei
llance apparatus between Algeciras and Spanish Morocco, which would come into operation in April. Godfrey knew how vital it was to find out what it was, as the Allies were planning north African landings for the autumn in an operation to be called ‘Torch’. Ian Fleming was already acting as his representative on Operation Goldeneye and was now put in charge of this new focus on Franco and the Mediterranean. Fleming was determined to frustrate, by one means or another, what he called the enemy’s ‘detailed and deadly watch’ on the Strait of Gibraltar.

  The ISK decodes had revealed that the Germans had codenamed their surveillance operation ‘Bodden’. Philby realised that this was the name of the stretch of water between islands in the Baltic Sea and the mainland; one of these islands was home to Peenemünde, the site of the German missile scientific research establishment where the apparatus would have been tested. Combining the information from the GGG decodes with photographic intelligence of the sites, Dr R. V. Jones, head of the scientific section of SIS, soon diagnosed Bodden as a great heat-seeking infra-red searchlight across the strait. It was not long before Godfrey and the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, received a detailed report with proposals for counter-measures, including lagging of funnels. Unfortunately, in his excitement Pound revealed the top secret source of the information to people who were not cleared to know. Jones, who had a wicked sense of humour, saved the day by turning the tables and saying that the information had not come from codebreaking, since we hadn’t broken any German codes. It was a cover for a very secret source who had access to the Madrid Abwehr and went by the name of ‘el Hatto’. Arthur Hatto was in fact the Bletchley Park ISOS specialist who processed the intelligence from the ISK decodes and he was not amused when the story got around, insisting that everybody should have known that Hatto was ‘a good Anglo-Saxon name’.

  The next step was to decide what action should be taken on the Bodden enterprise before Operation Torch was activated. Fleming, who was always ready for action of any sort, wanted the SOE to blow the Bodden sites up, but Philby, when he came to write My Silent War, commented wryly that he ‘doubted whether anyone on our side would really welcome a James Bond-like free-for-all in Spain’. Captain Hillgarth, who throughout Goldeneye had worked so hard on keeping Spain out of the war, persuaded Godfrey against such an action and the Foreign Office, which was anxious not to let offensive action increase the influence of pro-Nazi ministers around General Franco, certainly preferred to play the diplomatic card. Having discussed it with Churchill, our ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, told Franco that we had become aware that he had allowed the Germans to set up surveillance sites wearing Spanish uniforms, thereby infringing Spanish neutrality. On 29 May 1942, the ISK section decoded a message on the main Abwehr machine from Madrid to Berlin reporting that ‘the Golfers had become aware of Bodden South and have lodged a note of complaint with the Spanish government’. Much to our amusement, the Germans always referred to the UK as ‘Golf Course’. However, pressure was put on Franco, who had no wish to be drawn into the war, and there was no further serious breach of neutrality on Spain’s part. The fear of Franco providing air-bases from which the Luftwaffe could attack Gibraltar’s airfield and dockyard or bomb the allies taking part in the planned Torch landings had now receded. Even though the Foreign Office had watered down Fleming’s gung-ho Goldeneye proposals, he always remembered with satisfaction his Goldeneye mission and named his post-war home in his Jamaican paradise, where James Bond was born, after the operation.

  A complete picture of the Abwehr in Spain had been built up thanks to Goldeneye spying and the ISK decodes. We knew the names, pseudonyms, cover and real functions of the staff at Madrid HQ and the many outstations. As Cowgill said, ‘we even knew what they had for breakfast’. One of our decodes from Algeciras to Madrid had revealed that ‘Axel’ had bitten ‘Caesar’, who was now in hospital. Philby rightly guessed that Axel was not a fellow agent but the guard dog procured for the Bodden South apparatus. A Goldeneye officer investigated and reported that a certain Albrecht Carbe had been admitted to hospital with a dog bite at the right time. Caesar’s cover was now blown and another piece of the German secret service jigsaw had been put together. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, had a major interest in maintaining an effective Spanish organisation. He had been closely involved with General Franco in the Civil War and, as Hitler’s spymaster, had been entrusted with key elements of Operation Felix; it was Canaris’s ambition to see the Germans seize Gibraltar.

  During 1942, the ISK Abwehr decodes became even more important and took on an operational dimension. Up to now, the information that the double agents had been sending out to their controllers was largely confined to false reports of dockyard activity, mine-laying, bomb damage, information generally designed to give a false picture of German successes in their bombing campaign and British preparations for the defence of the UK. Now that Allied invasions were being planned and protection needed for the convoys, the double agents could send out misleading information about their destinations to controllers in Madrid or Lisbon, which would be reported to Berlin. Our ISK section would then read the exchange of messages and the comments and questions of the Abwehr bosses allowed the XX Committee to tell whether the bait had been swallowed or not and to what extent the agent’s credibility was trusted.

  It was Dilly’s great achievement in breaking the Abwehr Enigma used on the higher-level Abwehr communications links that allowed the XX Committee to be absolutely certain their deception operations were working. By the spring of 1942, the information collected from the ISK decrypts had built up such a good picture of Abwehr operations that MI5 was able to state categorically that it now controlled all the German agents operating in Britain and that it knew precisely what value the Germans put on their reports.

  The whole Double Cross operation was shrouded in complete secrecy. Only a very few people at NID12, the naval intelligence department that handled the reports from Bletchley, were allowed to see the XX messages, which carried a docket marked 00, indicating that their security was even higher than mere Top Secret. This may be the reason Fleming gave James Bond the designation 007. Churchill insisted on seeing every message and not just a synopsis, as he relished the cloak-and-dagger nature of it all.

  The XX Committee’s first success in creating what Churchill would later describe as the ‘bodyguard of lies’ came during Operation Torch, the amphibious landings in north Africa in November 1942. For months, the double agents had been sending reports designed to make the Germans believe that troop build-ups and Allied convoys were related to attacks on France and Norway, and the relief of Malta.

  The key double agents used in Operation Overthrow, a Torch deception plan, included the Dane Wulf Schmidt, codenamed Tate, who was ostensibly living in a house in north London and reported extensive troop movements across south-east England; Friedl Gärtner, codenamed Gelatine, an Austrian secretary in MI5, who played the part of a female agent who reported gossip among senior officers and civil servants suggesting preparations for invasions of northern Europe; and two Norwegians, Helge Moe and Tor Glad, who had been sent to Scotland by the Germans on a sabotage mission. They immediately gave themselves up and were codenamed Mutt and Jeff, after two hapless characters in a US newspaper cartoon. They reported on troops preparing for mountain and arctic warfare in Scotland apparently in preparation for an invasion of Norway. But the star turn was undoubtedly Garbo, the most accomplished of fraudsters.

  Garbo was a Spaniard, Juan Pujol Garcia, who entirely of his own volition, partly for cash and partly because he hated the Germans, was sending them false reports from Lisbon based on nothing more than a Blue Guide to Britain, a Portuguese book on the Royal Navy and an Anglo-French vocabulary of military terms. He claimed to have a wide network of sub-agents in Britain feeding him information and eventually he was taken over by the British and brought to London where his attempts to sabotage the German intelligence service could be controlled by the XX Committee. Garbo’s fictitiou
s sub-agents reported widespread troop movements in southern England that might be expected before an invasion of France. He also warned the Abwehr that suggestions that the Allies did not have enough ships ready for an invasion of France were deliberate rumours ‘to confuse you’. His Abwehr controller told him it was ‘of the greatest importance’ that he get as much information as possible on any movements and preparations for an invasion, ‘especially the Isle of Wight and regions of Wales’. As the official historian noted, ‘Garbo did his best to oblige’.

  With both Hitler and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the German commander in western Europe, convinced the Allies intended to invade France and Norway that summer, it was clear from the Abwehr communications deciphered by the ISK section that the double agents’ warnings were reinforcing that view. Back-up was always given for the misinformation. An American intelligence officer, Lewis Powell, a future justice of the Supreme Court, was amazed when his troopship arrived at Bristol and was very publicly issued with skis before heading off in a northerly direction; only after a circuitous journey did they find themselves passing through the Strait of Gibraltar to join the rest of the armada. Once it was obvious that the Allied fleets were heading for the Mediterranean, the double agents had to tell their controllers that they were after all destined for Malta, Crete or Sicily.

  Remarkably the combined Allied fleet passed safely through the Strait of Gibraltar at the dead of night and proceeded full steam ahead along the Mediterranean. But suddenly it made a sharp turn south to land on beaches at Oran and Algiers in preparation for driving Rommel out of north Africa. If ever an operation was unlikely to succeed it was this one. To land first 90,000 men and later another 200,000 with all their supplies, across 1,500 miles of sea from Britain and 3,000 miles from America, would only be possible with complete signals security and keeping the enemy guessing as to their destination until the last moment. Mercifully, the Italian fleet was out of action after the Battle of Matapan.