Dilly

by Batey, Mavis;

  The XX Committee cleverly modified Garbo’s reports as the Torch landings approached. On 29 October, he told his Abwehr controller: ‘I do not wish to make further predictions about the future objective, only I can assure you that an operation of great importance is imminent and I think I fulfil my duty by advising you of this danger.’ He did eventually report that the Allies intended to invade French North Africa but too late for the Germans to do anything. The Abwehr was completely taken in. ‘Your last reports were magnificent,’ his controller told him, ‘we are sorry they arrived late.’

  Back at Bletchley Park, we were flat out on a jumbo rush throughout this period; for these occasions, Dilly’s girls had acquired a toy elephant, which was brought out of the cupboard for the duration. When we put on the early morning radio news after nights of slogging and heard that our troops had safely landed in north Africa, we knew what jumbo rush was all about. So successful was Operation Torch and its ‘bodyguard of lies’ that Rommel only heard about it on his radio at the same time as we did. Jumbo was patted on his back and returned to the cupboard for the next rush.

  As a result of the invasion of north Africa, we acquired another Abwehr machine. Godfrey had authorised Ian Fleming to set up a joint service combat unit for amphibious landings which would make their way to the enemy HQ in order to seize codes and other secret material before they could be destroyed. This followed an example set by the Germans in Crete. Fleming’s ‘Red Indians’, as he referred to them, were originally called the Special Engineering Unit and subsequently the 30 Assault Unit, their motto being ‘Attain by Surprise’. They were given commando training with additional training in safe-breaking, interrogation and what they should look for. On this particular occasion, in conjunction with the Americans, they captured a ‘KK’ rewired multi-turnover Abwehr machine used for a link that had not been broken before; it was a Vichy French network run by the German Armistice Commission, in whose offices the machine was discovered, and six-weeks’ back-traffic was soon broken. But it was not quite as easy as it sounds, as the Abwehr were notorious for thinking up ingenious methods of indicating and we had to keep our wits about us to solve the system. The type of indicator on the KK machine was the same as that used by the German armed forces, making it look as though the window positions were for a machine with three wheels. An indicator was chosen by the operator at random and set up and any three letters enciphered. The final window position was noted and the first three letters of it used as the message setting. The original indicator was then set up again and the message setting enciphered, giving the second three-letter group. Thus, after the recipient had deciphered the indicator, the first three letters were already set up on the machine and all that remained to do was to turn the right-hand wheel to read the same as the Umkehrwalze.

  Plans for the invasion of southern Europe, once the African shores of the Mediterranean were cleared of Axis forces, were already in place. This time the landing point really would be Sicily, to attack Churchill’s ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe. The invasion was to be called Operation Husky and would have as its bodyguard not a double agent but a dead body. The body, supposedly that of a British officer who had been in a crashed aircraft, was dropped off the southern coast of Spain, close enough to ensure it washed ashore. He was carrying a number of documents, including a photograph of a fictional fiancée and two love letters but more importantly a letter from Lord Mountbatten, the Chief of Joint Operations, which referred jocularly to sardines. The Spanish were known to collaborate with the Abwehr and it was rightly assumed that the documents would be shown to the Germans who would draw the natural conclusion from Mountbatten’s joke that the Allies’ first target would be Sardinia. The operation was dubbed Mincemeat and Duff Cooper, chairman of the Cabinet Security Committee at the time, wrote a novel based on it, called Operation Heartbreak, and Ewen Montagu, who had taken part in the deception, wrote an officially sanctioned account in The Man Who Never Was in 1953, which sold nearly two million copies; but the real truth could not be told.

  It was crucial that the Allies know the German high command’s reaction to the deception operation and only ISK could reveal that. Jumbo was taken out of his cupboard again. Churchill was at the Trident conference in Washington in May 1943 when he received with great glee a message saying: ‘Mincemeat swallowed whole.’ Hitler himself had said: ‘The planned attack will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnese.’ We even knew the Abwehr were delighted that they had worked out what was meant by ‘sardines’. The XX Committee particularly enjoyed that. The Germans moved troops to Sardinia, reducing their defences on Sicily, which was the real target. Husky’s success, with its ‘bodyguard of lies’, would provide an excellent precedent for the deception plans for the D-Day landings, the first stage of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe.

  The ISK and ISOS decrypts allowed SIS, MI5 and the XX Committee to build up a very detailed picture of the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst, including their operating methods, cover addresses and the names of their officers and agent handlers. It also ensured that German agents coming to Britain were identified and arrested, and could therefore be bought into the Double Cross system, but that was not its only contribution. It allowed the British to foil attempts at sabotage, especially of shipping from Gibraltar; it gave a detailed picture of extensive Spanish government help to the Abwehr, enabling the Foreign Office to protest to the Spanish and restrain their collaboration; and it provided material which could be used to obtain further information from German agents under interrogation.

  By far the greatest contribution made by the ISK decrypts, however, was to building up the Double Cross system to the point that it could be used as an extensive ‘bodyguard of lies’ to protect the forces taking part in the D-Day landings. Churchill had told Josef Stalin, during the Tehran conference in late November 1943, that ‘in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’. The XX Committee set about using the Double Cross agents to create those lies.

  Allied commanders had selected Normandy as the best landing place for the massed invasion force, but they knew that any amphibious force would automatically find itself at a disadvantage and that with sufficient forces the Germans could well throw them back into the sea. So for months beforehand the Double Cross agents were used to provide overwhelming evidence of an entirely fictitious plan under which the Normandy landings were a feint designed to draw German forces away from the real point of attack on the Pas de Calais. A fictitious 1st United States Army Group (FUSAG), led by the US war hero General George Patton, was notionally created to lead the assault on the Pas de Calais. By the beginning of 1944, the XX Committee was controlling fifteen double agents, four of whom were the key players in Churchill’s ‘bodyguard of lies’. As with Torch, Garbo was to be the most important of those agents. The other three were the Pole Roman Garby-Czerniawski, codenamed Brutus; the Yugoslav Duško Popov, codenamed Tricycle; and a Frenchwoman, Natalie ‘Lily’ Sergueiev, codenamed Treasure.

  Between them Tricycle and Brutus passed the Abwehr reports on the mythical FUSAG and its troops preparing for the invasion in south-east England that were so detailed that the Germans were able to compile its complete order of battle even down to the insignia painted on the side of the vehicles of its different units. Treasure meanwhile reported on a supposed lack of troops in south-west England that would persuade the Germans there were no plans for a major assault on Normandy. Dummy tanks and invasion landing craft were left in the open in the Kent ports and mobile wireless vehicles travelled around sending out hundreds of radio messages to simulate the communications of an army based in the south-east while complete wireless silence was imposed on the real troops in the south-west.

  Yet again, however, it was Garbo who played the key role. In the early hours of 6 June 1944, D-Day, Garbo made repeated attempts to warn his Abwehr controller that the Allied forces were on their way, knowing it would be too late for the Germans to do anythi
ng about it, but building up their trust in him. Then shortly after midnight on 9 June, as the Allied advance faltered and with two Panzer divisions on their way to reinforce the German defences in Normandy, Garbo sent his most important message. The Normandy landings were only a feint, he said. Three of his agents were reporting troops massed across East Anglia and Kent and large numbers of troop and tank transporters waiting in the eastern ports ready for the main assault:

  After personal consultation on 8 June in London with my agents Donny, Dick and Derrick, whose reports I sent today, I am of the opinion, in view of the strong troop concentrations in south-east and east England, that these operations are a diversionary manoeuvre designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make an attack at another place. In view of the continued air attacks on the concentration area mentioned, which is a strategically favourable position for this, it may very probably take place in the Pas de Calais area.

  Garbo’s warning went straight to Hitler, who ordered the two Panzer divisions to the Pas de Calais, to defend against what he expected to be the main thrust of the invasion, and awarded Garbo the Iron Cross. Had the two divisions continued to Normandy, it is arguable that the Allies may well have been thrown back into the sea. On 11 June, we deciphered a message from Berlin to Garbo’s controller in Madrid saying that Garbo’s reports ‘have been confirmed almost without exception and are to be described as especially valuable. The main line of investigation in future is to be the enemy group of forces in south-eastern and eastern England.’

  These intercepts of Abwehr Enigma messages were vital to Allied commanders’ confidence in the plans, confirming that the Germans believed that the main thrust of the allied attack would be on the Pas de Calais. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, in charge of the amphibious landings at Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters for the Allied Expeditionary Forces, wrote in his diary on the eve of D-Day: ‘We must trust in our invisible assets to tip the balance in our favour.’ That trust was well justified. Even at the end of the war, the German generals believed that the Allies had intended to make their main attack on the Pas de Calais and only changed their minds because of the strength of the German forces based there. Reminded of the deception twenty-two years later, Eisenhower laughed and said: ‘By God, we fooled them, didn’t we?’

  Sadly, Dilly did not live to see what was – in all probability – the most important contribution to the war made by his great triumph in breaking the Abwehr Enigma.

  TWELVE

  Farewell

  My most enduring memory of Dilly is of staying at Courns Wood in his last spring. He had invited me over to see the ‘loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ in full bloom under the guest bedroom. He was still passionate about his trees and I learned a lot about the Chiltern woodlands that weekend; but it could no longer be the strenuous planting or sawing and splitting of wood he so loved to do. I just helped him shake pine cone seeds into tobacco tins for scattering. I hope my efforts for posterity have come to maturity in the Naphill woods. Flourishing outside the village hall was the Atlantic cedar he had planted for the celebration of King George VI’s coronation in 1937. Today it is lit up every Christmas.

  While Olive was getting the supper Dilly got out the photographs of the Mimiambi fragments from the Greek papyri and showed me how he had put them together. At least we had a table to spread them out on and one can only wonder how he managed to do it on his knees on the train from High Wycombe to London and the reaction of his fellow commuters reading their newspapers.

  Olive had greeted me with an apology that the laundry hadn’t come and would I mind sleeping in Ronnie’s sheets as he had just left. Dilly added that it was all right to do so because he was very clean. Ronnie had not come to see the cherries ‘hung with snow’ as he could have his fill of them in Housman’s own Shropshire, where he was living in a convent engaged in translating the Bible into English for Roman Catholics. It was this on which he had been consulting Dilly, as he had just got to the Epistles and for St Paul’s visit to the Corinthians, and he too was battling with Greek papyri. Dilly said he had translated more of it than Ronnie as his brother’s Greek was not up to standard. He felt that Ronnie ought to know more about the Corinthians and their way of life in the same way in which he had sought out the world behind Herodas when editing his mimiambics. He had also tried to steep himself in the German mindset when coming to terms with the Abwehr.

  Churchill had perceptively assessed, when referring in 1919 to Room 40’s successful codebreaking, that it had needed ‘a study of the psychology of the persons sending out the messages and a sort of instinctive “flair” for the kind of things they are saying’, which was different from ‘intelligence analysis’. Dilly had been able to take his time reading the stacks of ISOS hand cipher messages shown to him by Oliver Strachey before he broke the Abwehr Enigma and had got a good idea of the psychology of the spy people he was dealing with. Psychology had taken on a new dimension since Freud. The sixpenny Pelican series had produced his Psychopathology of Everyday Life just before the war and we were all into the subconscious and Freudian slips. I enrolled for the Cambridge extra-mural psychology course being given in the town as soon as I arrived at Bletchley and felt one up on everybody else as when I was at Zurich University I had heard Freud’s disciple, Carl Jung, lecture.

  We pursued our operator’s subconscious when setting up his supposedly random indicators. Settings which could be guessed from idiosyncrasies of the operator became known as ‘psillis’ as an extension of Dilly’s cillis, which were more attributable to the conscious slackness of the operator than determined by his subconscious. As the Abwehr had four-letter indicators there was much more Freudian scope for codebreakers. Girlfriends of course were an obvious giveaway and ROSA with her in-built lobster was a friend indeed. I became an expert in four-letter dirty German words and was dismayed when one day there was a reprimand from Berlin to operators for using obscenities when young girls were having to decode them. They meant the German girls of course, not us. Needless to say, we were furious when they were abandoned. We were prepared for anything with the Abwehr indicating systems.

  Sometimes it was a new cipher boss who made life difficult for us. One, von Bentheim, decreed that in future indicators should be encoded half at a Grundstellung and half at a setting of a German folk song, for which my German romantics had fortunately prepared me. Sometimes the indicators had to be scrambled so that ROSAZ ROSAZ on a given key 5332142514 would be encoded at the Grundstellung as ZSSORAOZRA, which played havoc with boxing. It made us quite dizzy and we called it ‘jitterboxing’ after the new jitterbugging dance that the Americans had just taught us. I think we could rightly say in ISK that, to our knowledge, in machine cryptography our problems for variety and novelty were unequalled. We were prepared for anything, however bizarre.

  There was worse to come in the summer when the Abwehr suddenly got round to realising the folly of using double indicators on a fixed Grundstellung, which the services had abandoned as long ago as 1938. Gone was boxing altogether, and our lovely chain-lobstering, when faced with single indicators; new methods for textual breaks for multi-turnover machines had to be made, involving making new catalogues and even our own bombe. Peter Twinn had worked with Alan Turing on the Letchworth bombes for Hut 6 and Hut 8, but if we were to have one made for our Abwehr machine it would need to have an additional electro-mechanical counter to account for the Abwehr machine having a moveable Umkehrwalze. Peter went to show the proposed diagram to Dilly and came back with a special name for it – Fünf, after Tommy Handley’s German spy in the hilariously popular radio comedy ITMA, then all the rage. Fünf was in action by November and Jean Hazlerigg took charge of our Spy Enigma menus for the Wrens in the Bombe Hut to set up when all other methods failed.

  There was still much hand-work to be done before resorting to programming Fünf and Twinn produced a blackboard and asked me to explain the new method to the girls. We had had to take on more staff who had never heard of Enigma before an
d even someone who had worked on the old system said that she had never understood what it was all about as she just got on with following Dilly’s simple instructions of how to do it, so why bother about explaining new theories when she didn’t need to know the old? I must have told Dilly, who was still deep in Ronnie’s epistles, about my frustrations, as I have a letter back from him saying:

  There is a lesson from Corinthians for you beginning: ‘If after the manner of men, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus’ that would appear apt enough for your efforts to teach the newcomers. A little further on we have the famous proof of the resurrection, ‘if the dead rise not, then is our teaching in vain’, which is a form of argument which can be paraphrased to meet all hecklings as you will see.

  The hecklers were right, of course; in ISK you could drive the car perfectly well without knowing what went on under the bonnet. Later, when Keith Batey joined us permanently, he tried to give a newcomer a tutorial on how the machine worked technically and afterwards she fled, never to be seen again; it was rumoured she had had a nervous breakdown.

  Dilly was very anxious that I should meet his niece, Penelope Knox, to try and persuade her to leave working for her father at Punch and join us in ISK. However, I did not actually meet her until 1975, when she had begun to write her biography of the Knox brothers. Naturally she would have liked to have known about Dilly’s wartime work and thought that all could now be revealed after Frederick Winterbotham’s book on Bletchley Park had been published in 1974. We had been told that it was now permissible to be anecdotal but on no account to give technical details of codebreaking in interviews, so we could not be much help; nor could Margaret Rock or Peter Twinn. It was only in 1982 that Gordon Welchman wrote his book on Hut 6 giving technical details of the breaking of Enigma. However, Penelope’s husband paid a visit to Gustave Bertrand, whose book Enigma had been published in 1973, and he was able to furnish her with details about Dilly’s visit to Warsaw and other contacts he had had with him. Unfortunately, Bertrand, who was no cryptographer, also offered to explain ‘the early stages in the solving of Enigma’, which he had never understood, and Dilly must have turned in his grave to see the resulting description of his work as recorded by Penelope.