Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  “I trust ‘our organisation’ will oblige,” said the Templer, looking up from his pad.

  “I told her that if people like her thought more about what they should be putting into us instead of taking out we might have our own state by now and all the Jews from Europe living in it.”

  “Was that wise? Shouldn’t we be keeping our hosts happy? What was all that about Yekkes? Surely she didn’t think I was a Yekke?”

  “Why not? Open your eyes. Look around,” said Lang with one of his rare, smiles. “You’ll see a few people around here who could be your relatives and would still fail the Nuremberg race laws. Anyway, she told me the last thing this country needed was any more Yekkes telling people what to do. She’s all right; just likes to grumble. Her brother is sympathetic and he happens to own this place.”

  “Well I can understand her concern about your modifications. When will you be ready?”

  “In a few minutes. I’ll see if once around the room on the curtain rail and then out of her window into her bougainvillaea will do. It shouldn’t be necessary to give the aerial so much of a run here. The Haifa apartment, the way it was constructed, it was full of metal. The more metal the more interference. There’s virtually none in this place. But if it doesn’t work I’ll try running it across the ceiling a couple of times.”

  The Templer grunted. He was not technically minded. All he ever asked of miracles of science was that somebody else made them work perfectly.

  “Are you going to tell Athens about the lost signals plan?” Lang inquired stepping down the ladder. The Templer winced. He had almost succeeded in pushing it out of his mind. “Do you think it’s necessary?”

  “I don’t see why. Your wireless people told me they would always listen out for me on that Athens quartermaster’s frequency.”

  “Well if you don’t think it matters.” He had never told him about the other thing he had lost with the signals plan. It was the home telephone number of the hero-worshipping Jacob Haratvi. Before he left Athens Lang had been pushed to nominate someone as a post box of last resort if he had to go to ground. Someone he might leave a message with who could be obliquely contacted by another agent in place. Haratvi was quite unaware of this honour. As far as Lang was concerned the main qualification of his ardent gofer was that, whatever he fondly imagined, he was not an active member of his organisation whose names were not for Sicherheitsdienst files.

  “Is it a long message?” asked Lang.

  “Three minutes at the most if you haven’t lost your touch.”

  Lang didn’t say anything. It was long enough. His trainers in Athens had drummed into him that one of the things the British were good at was radio direction finding. When you went on the air you were putting your head over the parapet. The shorter the message the better your chances. Please and thank you also hang you.

  Both the signals he had sent from Haifa had been as short as you could make them. All he had done was tap out R38, the call sign the Templer had chosen for him followed by the letter N twice to indicate that he had arrived safely through Alexandretta. The second he had tapped out the call sign, waited for a reply, then sent the letter F to confirm the Templer had survived the drop on the Hattin and was with him in Haifa. Maximum time on the air was probably not much more than ten seconds. A radio monitor trawling the waveband would need a lot of luck to pick up an unlogged signal as brief as that.

  The Templer was good at word games and it did not take him long to encipher his message. He was using the system the British called Playfair which had the advantage of being easy to compile and the disadvantage of being almost as easy to crack. It required the alphabet to be arranged in five columns of five letters by dropping the letter J which was combined with I and guessed at by context. Sender and receiver agreed on a key word or words. The Templer, after some thought, had chosen HEYDRICH ZULU which was quite good because only two letters were repeated. He then put down the ten different letters the two words contained - HEYDRICZUL - into the first nine squares of the five-column grid. The other fifteen squares were filled by the remaining letters of the alphabet written in alphabetical order so that the grid ended in X. And if it was picked up and the British code breakers got to work on it he had made it slightly harder for them by adding a twist of his own that his signals people in Athens had quite admired.

  The Templer’s complete message had little to do with the main task at hand. It was sent by a man who prided himself on never being content to do no more than was strictly necessary. Perhaps, above all, it was being sent by a senior officer, a deskman, making his first excursion into the field and determined to show how it should be done. If in the great intelligence jigsaw you should identify a small piece of a comrade’s puzzle then it was your duty to pass it on. And the Templer was pleased to think there was something of the decoy about it too because if his message was intercepted and deciphered it was more likely to confuse than illuminate.

  Before he encoded it, the Templer broke his message into the bigrams, the two letter groups, which Lang would tap out. It read: EX PE CT MI SS IO NC OM PL ET ED WI TH IN 48 HO UR SR EL AY PA RI SS OU TH CO AS TB RI TI SH PO ST AL CE NS OR SS EN SI TI VE RE CE NT CA NA DI AN TR OO PD EP LO YM EN TS PO RT SM OU TH AR EA.

  ***

  “Don’t you see,” De Wet had told Jessica, making an inspired guess at the censor’s vile intrusion into little sister’s prose. “If I remember rightly, Guilford’s not all that far away from Portsmouth.”

  “Just down the A3,” Jessica had agreed, sipping her whisky and soda, very weak, nothing like Ahmed’s.

  “It could be that these Canadians are about to take part in some sort of operation. Did your sister ever mention them doing any boat training?”

  “If she did it would be under the blue crayon. Why? Do you think they’re going to open the Second Front?”

  “Who knows? it could be a big raid like the one on St Nazaire to wreck the dry dock the Tirpitz was going to use.”

  “Well, I still think it’s pretty stupid to mess up people’s letters like that. Say somehow the letter had fallen into German hands, say the aircraft had been shot down over enemy territory and the mailbag found in the wreckage. When the Germans read that letter all that blue crayon would draw their attention to the Canadians being up to something wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, I suppose you have a point,” said De Wet.

  Then they had had another good giggle over HUFOM just as Jessica had hoped he would.

  ***

  “Activity nil,” Mitzi wrote in pencil on the pad of red printed forms by her side on which she was also required to write the particular frequency she was monitoring and the date and time. The forms were printed in red to indicate that their contents were Secret, perhaps even Top Secret.

  She looked at her watch. Another three hours to go. She found her left foot tapping on the pedal that operated the AR 80, the radio fingerprinting device, and quickly took it off. When it was working the AR 80 filmed a pictograph of Morse messages in dots and dashes which made it easier to learn to pick out the idiosyncrasies of an individual operator’s ‘fist’ so that the next time you saw a Q that was dah-dah-dit, dah rather than dah, dah, dit-dah you could check back and see where a Morse key had sung that way before. David Hare had told her there were only two of these machines in Palestine at present and he was trusting her with one because she was one of the best operators he knew. She might have been flattered had he not teamed her up with an overweight WAAF who did her best but was famous for a body odour no amount of eau de cologne would disguise.

  That apart it was without doubt the most boring job the British army had to offer and not for the first time Mitzi regretted that she had ever become adept at receiving high speed Morse. You sat there like some glorified switchboard operator with the steel Alice band the earphones were attached to messing up your hair, listening to nothing more but a faint and empty buzz. If you were lucky you were permitted to retune to a different waveband, a trek through an awful au
dio jungle, a nerve jangling symphony of high pitched hums and whines, where eerie swishing sounds, banshee wails, and the tormented groans of lost souls bounced off the ionosphere.

  Towards the end of her time in Cairo Mitzi had mostly escaped the drudgery of monitoring and progressed to translating captured documents with Maeltzer and Südfeld. But Hare had been given this shift to supervise and then found he was short staffed. Three of his female special operators were away sick, one in hospital with “gynaecological problems” having fallen into the hands of a butcher of an abortionist who almost killed her. “It’s all hands to the pumps,” Hare had told her, whatever that meant.

  They had assembled outside the hut, a bunch of females in uniform, all of them quite clever. Most of them were taking something in with them for their breaks: magazines, books, letters to finish on aerogramme paper and, in a couple of cases, skeins of wool and knitting needles. Hare had lent Mitzi a hardback copy of Ten Little Nigger Boys, Agatha Christie’s latest. Everybody smoked like mad because you weren’t allowed to smoke once inside.

  The WAAF was waving her own cigarette smoke away with a rolled newspaper. “Are you standing in for Miriam?” she asked Mitzi in Hebrew. She was a locally recruited member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, for much to the distress of the Royal Signals, monitoring had become a joint service activity as well as an increasingly female one. The Miriam in question was the special operator currently surviving on blood people had donated for wounded soldiers. “It’s a court martial offence, you know,” the WAAF had informed her taking a long, last draw at her cigarette. She had wonderful jet-black hair but a bit too much lipstick. “Abortion counts as a self-inflicted wound - like sunburn.”

  “Just shows, a girl can’t be too careful,” said Mitzi.

  Hare had walked up to them wearing his supervisor’s throat microphone with its black lead wire unplugged and coiled around his neck which made him look quite dashing, like one of those magazine pictures of flying helmeted aircrew. The throat mike was so that he could, if necessary, call up the Direction Finding teams the moment they had an intercept and get the minimum two compass bearings required to locate the transmitter. The DF teams in their little Marmon-Herrington armoured cars were parked about a mile away from each other at either end of the cantonment.

  The fat WAAF had given Hare a big smile and said, “Good evening sir” which he acknowledged with “Hi Ho” - the dwarves’ greeting from Disney’s Snow White being voguish.

  Mitzi felt thoroughly irritated and turned her back but Hare, pleased, pretended not to notice. “He’s cute. don’t you think?” said the WAAF.

  “I prefer mine without the cradle marks,” snapped Mitzi and, to her surprise, realised that she might even mean it. David was such a boy compared with Walter Calderwell.

  Then it was time to enter the gloom of the Set Room. Mitzi always imagined the inside of a casino must look something like this with the same kind of spotlighting over the green baize you always saw in the movies. In the darkness, cones of light from metal lampshades shaped like coolies’ hats illuminated rows of radios. There were eighteen of them in all, mostly newly delivered Hallicraft 28 Skyriders, arranged in nine pairs either side of a central aisle of polished brown linoleum at the end of which stood the desk occupied by Hare in his duty supervisor role. Between each pair of receivers was a raised wooden tray where the operators placed the red printed message slips and the carbons they were required to make. Every so often these would be collected by the supervisor who would sometimes leave his desk to patrol the aisle. Sometimes Hare found himself walking on the balls of his feet like an invigilating schoolmaster anxious not to break the desperate silence of the examination room. Above them ceiling propeller fans churned air scented with sweat and whatever the female operators could get to try and mask it.

  Hare had spotted Mitzi chatting to the WAAF and, thinking they must be old friends, set them up as a team on a table near his desk. Rather than something out of the German military net he allotted them each one of the frequencies Calderwell had discovered in the cigarettes he found on the Hattin. “It’s possible that a special customer will come up on one of these at any time,” he explained. “I can’t tell you anymore. All I can say is that it’s important.” As an afterthought, before he took his place at his desk, Hare had warned the WAAF, “Your frequency is sometimes used by a Wehrmacht quartermaster’s unit in Athens so you’re almost certain to get some outgoing traffic. What we’re interested in is what they’re receiving.”

  ***

  But tonight the quartermaster was not doing business. Not over his wireless net he wasn’t. For the umpteenth time the WAAF readjusted the fine tuning: waves crashed on a storm drenched shore; the screech of a tortured cat was followed by the plaintive chiming of a cracked bell. Then she was back between the margins of the frequency again in all its faintly hissing emptiness. She looked across to her left and saw that Mitzi had her eyes closed and was holding a pencil in her mouth like a cigarette. The WAAF tapped her on the arm a couple of times and when Mitzi reluctantly opened her eyes and turned to face her she mimed a cup to the lips. Mitzi smiled and nodded and the WAAF removed her headphones which she handed to Mitzi who put them over her own headphones and by pulling her own right earpiece forward arranged it so that she was half listening to both sets. The WAAF then waddled off towards the tea urn. Her progress was briefly noted by Hare who every few seconds would look up and inspect his domain then return to the crossword he was trying to finish in a month old copy of The Manchester Guardian.

  Mitzi was thinking how good it would be to have a cigarette with her tea when her right ear, the one that was monitoring the WAAF’s set, was suddenly full of crystal clear, hand sent and repetitive morse. It sounded so close it could have been transmitted from the next room. She slid across to the WAAF’s seat and stomped the control pedal of the AR80 for a radio finger print. At the same time the pencil in her right hand was beginning to move over the red printed message pad while with her left she picked up her uniform cap and stated waving it over her head without looking up to see whether Hare had spotted the agreed signal for an intercept.

  As it happened, he was by her side in seconds, murmuring insistently into his controller’s throat mike to the Direction Finding teams in the armoured cars, giving them the agreed code for the frequency the WAAF had been monitoring and ordering, “copy this station, copy this”. And all the time Mitzi was writing down what she could hear in the single headphone which three times running was the various dits and dahs for R38 in Morse, a short pause and then again R38 three times and then, oh joy, almost as good as sex, the distinctly fainter TTTTT, the international l sign for “I am receiving you”, followed by what they knew was the receiving station’s call sign in German occupied Athens: E M A, E M A, E M A. Dit dahdah ditdah, all short letters so they would not be on the air too long. And then, after the tiniest of pauses, R38 was sending his message in two letter groups while Mitzi’s pencil flew effortlessly across her pad and Hare, gentle as a lover, bent over her and carefully disentangled the headphones so that she had one from the WAAF’s set on each ear. The WAAF had returned to her set with the two steaming white mugs of NAAFI tea in each hand and tears in her eyes because a couple of minutes either way it would have been her intercept and that, it seemed, was the story of her entire life.

  All the other Special Operators in the Set Room were staring at them, a little tableau caught in the cone of light cast by the coolie hat lampshade. But Mitzi had the earphones on and only the WAAF was standing close enough to hear what Hare was murmuriing softly into the throat microphone connecting him to the Direction Finding teams., “Oh Christ! How long? Shit.”

  ***

  “It turned out it was their generator,” he explained the next day at the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, sitting in the Assistant Super’s office and telling him and Calderwell, who had been invited up, the good news and the bad news. “One DF car was working fine and so was the other one at first but th
ey were just starting to get a bearing when their bloody set went down.”

  “But you think this transmitter was here in Jerusalem?” said the Assistant Super who, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, lit another Capstan Full Strength instead.

  “One DF bearing went straight through the city,” Hare explained, still smarting from the rotten luck of it all. “We needed the other one to see whether it was fifty miles or so north or south of it. It’s as if we’ve got the longitude without quite getting the latitude. They were just beginning to get a fix on it when they stopped receiving.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” asked Calderwell. When he saw Hare he had assumed that he must have some more news about the plastic explosive used in the attempt to kill MacMichael. In his search for the man who called himself De Wet he had relegated the parachutes on the Hattin and those hand written numbers he had discovered on the cigarette papers to something rather less important.

  “Well for the next week those two DF cars are going to be up here in Jerusalem waiting for Roger 38 to come on air again.”

  “Roger what?” said Calderwell.

  “R38, it’s his call sign,” said Hare.

  “I see. And what happens after a week? What happens if he doesn’t haven’t anything more to say for another ten days?”

  “Well, the DF cars can’t stay here much longer. It’s been all I can do to borrow them for another week. Their unit is going up to El Alamein as soon as they’ve finished working up and getting rid of their gremlins. They’re being attached to an armoured brigade. There’s a new policy of getting closer to the enemy. Get a fix on the right Jerry headqusrters and artillery or the RAF might even get a chance to clobber Rommel.”

  “Hmm,” said Calderwell, deeply unimpressed. It seemed to him there was far too much jiggery-pokery in this war, always trying to cut corners instead of squaring up to the Hun. In 1917 his yeomanry regiment had charged a gun battery on horseback. He had leaned out of his saddle and killed the Austrian artillery officer about to shoot him with his pistol by piercing his neck with a basket hilted cavalry sword. Now that was getting closer to the enemy.