Secret Alliances

by Tony Insall

  It eventually proved possible to break the code which the Abwehr was using: it was a slightly different system from the one which Brodersen had described. The legal process therefore moved forward and, on 13 June, Sir Edward Atkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, recommended that the case should go ahead. The trial was scheduled to start at the Old Bailey on 27 June. Then legal problems arose. Brodersen’s solicitor said that they would wish to present evidence showing that Brodersen had been warned by the master of the ship on which he was travelling to Scotland, that he would be sent to jail or detained. This could have caused him to say nothing to anyone beforehand when he was questioned. Further, he would want at least one of the officers from Camp 020 to be available in court. The Security Service did not agree to this, arguing that half of their information about German intelligence came from interrogations there, and their interests had to be protected. Moreover, on reviewing the statement made to Brodersen which induced him to confess, it was concluded that it was tantamount to a threat. The Attorney General decided that the case should not proceed, and Brodersen was confined to Dartmoor prison for the remainder of the war. Impatient messages continued to arrive from Fanger demanding a response and threatening that his payments to Brodersen’s family would soon cease; they were ignored. Brodersen was returned to Norway in June 1945. In May 1947 he was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour for treason.

  Further German attempts to infiltrate agents into Britain from Norway

  The Germans also sometimes used Norway as a base to infiltrate their agents into other countries, or to land other nationals in Britain, unsupported by Norwegians. For example, in June 1940, Wilhelm Preetz, a German, was landed in Eire by submarine from Bergen. He was arrested there in August.16 And in August 1940, F. C. Hansen, a fanatical Danish Nazi working for the Abwehr officer von Finckenstein, transported four Danes including one Børresen, who had been trained in Oslo, from Ålesund to Scotland. The Camp 020 history records that Børresen was picked up and taken to Camp 020, but there are no further details available about him nor any mention of what happened to the other three Danes.

  There were plenty of other rather clumsier German attempts to send agents from Norway over to Britain. The first involved Karl Drucke, a German, Werner Walti, a Swiss radio operator, and Vera Eriksen, who was apparently half Danish and half Russian-Polish, who were delivered to the Scottish coast by a flying boat operating from Stavanger and landed by dinghy on 30 September 1940. They were dropped a long way off the coast and had to jettison their bicycles to keep afloat while they rowed for three hours to get ashore. They were ill-prepared, with poor documentation, attracting attention because of their bedraggled appearance and ignorance of their whereabouts, and were quickly arrested. Drucke and Walti were executed. Eriksen did not stand trial, and both the reasons for this and her subsequent fate after wartime internment attracted much colourful, even lurid, speculation. Her Security Service file describes her as a pathological liar, who admitted that she had worked as a Soviet agent in the early 1930s, but contains no reason to explain why she was treated differently at a time before the Double-Cross system was established, when the Security Service would have had good reason to make an example of any German spy whom they caught.17

  The next party also arrived by dinghy, landing on the Scottish coast on 25 October 1940. It comprised Otto Joost, a German, and two Norwegians – Legvald Lund and Gunnar Edvardsen, a journalist whom the Security Service considered to be a man of intelligence and education. They were even more ill-prepared, with no papers and little training or briefing beyond an instruction to cut telephone wires with the insulated pliers with which each had been provided. At the time of their landing, the Abwehr in Norway expected that the invasion of Britain would take place within three weeks, so did not think any further preparation or precaution was necessary. They were quickly captured, and then claimed that they had intended to give themselves up. Although some Security Service officers wished to invoke the Treachery Act against them, they were treated leniently and interned. After the war Edvardsen was sentenced to two years’ hard labour, though Lund was acquitted.18

  After these early and rather crude attempts, the Abwehr changed their approach and began to attempt to infiltrate their agents among genuine parties of refugees, a tactic which represented a more serious threat. In early March 1941 the Volga arrived from Bergen with six people on board, two of whom, the skipper Peder Øien and Karl August Hanssen, aroused suspicion. It was established that Øien had obtained a briefing from the Germans on his route through the minefields, and did not have a permit to leave port, or even a fishing licence. He appeared to be answerable to Hanssen, a Swede who had been a waiter for fourteen years at the Hotel Norge in Bergen which was a known centre of German espionage prior to the occupation and well used by Germans and quislings. On the journey over, Hanssen’s behaviour had aroused the suspicion of other members of the party. Moreover, on arrival in Camp 020 he was denounced by Wallem, who had already confessed to being a German agent. Wallem claimed to have seen Hanssen in Bergen in the company of Martin Hjørnevik who had recruited him, and they had gone together to visit another quisling, Huse. However, despite these adverse indications, the Security Service found insufficient evidence to charge Øien or Hanssen. They were therefore interned for safekeeping instead.19

  When assessing German espionage planning, the Security Service found worrying parallels between the mission of the Olav and that of the Tånevik, which arrived in late April 1941 crewed by Bjarne Hansen, Hans Anton Hanssen, Henry Torgersen and Johan Johansen Strandmoen. Identification of these Abwehr agents did not depend on ISOS, but on the chance sighting of Bjarne Hansen at the RVPS by Bjarne Jørgensen, who had recently escaped from Norway and who denounced Hansen as being a man whom he had known in Ålesund as a German agent. Under interrogation, Hansen admitted that the Tånevik had been sent to Britain by Angermeyer, with whom he had been associated in smuggling activities over many years. In the summer of 1940 Angermeyer used Hansen as a recruiting agent and asked him to find men for a job on the French coast which would involve taking small craft to Britain to land spies. Hansen put this to Strandmoen who accepted. He acted as crew on a cutter which landed the German spy Charles van den Kieboom on the Kent coast. Van den Kieboom was later executed. In July 1940 Angermeyer also ordered Hansen and Torgersen to go to the Shetlands on the Boreas to find out about shipping. Hansen said that they laid up in Norwegian fjords and did not fulfil their mission, although they were well paid for it.

  The Security Service had difficulty in working out what they were tasked to do. ISOS messages had merely provided advance warning of the operation, without identifiable details of the crew members. B1 speculated that the powerful wireless receiving set found on board was to be used to receive information about rendezvous for agents at sea. The crew eventually admitted that they had been in German pay for several months and their mission was to return with general information. All four were interned. B1 concluded that the case showed a certain lack of organisation and coordination on the part of the security authorities in Britain, since the similarity of the two expeditions should have drawn attention to the suspicious features of the Olav leading to the earlier detection of Johansen and his crew.20

  The last potentially significant case in 1941 involved Gustav Rønning and Martin Olsen, two seamen who arrived in the Faroes with their families on the Arnvid in September. ISOS had given some indications beforehand, but it was only when Rønning admitted during interrogation that his spy name was Frithjof that it was possible, through an examination of ISOS records, to establish the extent of what he had done for the Germans. He had been recruited in July 1940 and tasked to take a German agent to Iceland, though this attempt was thwarted by poor weather and the apparent reluctance of the agent to carry out his mission. Thereafter, Rønning worked quite assiduously, sailing up and down the coast to try to investigate attempts to escape to Britain, and questioning dependants of the men who had managed to get
away in an attempt to gather information about who was behind them. Olsen assisted him in these enterprises.

  At the end of a protracted investigation, Milmo provided a summary of the case to the Norwegians in November 1942. He concluded that they were a pair of scoundrels. While there was no evidence that they were guilty of any espionage attempt against Britain (and the fact that they had brought their families with them was a point which helped them to prove this), they had, on their own admission, worked for the best part of a year for the Abwehr and had not hesitated to accept money and carry out at least some of the commissions given to them. Since these consisted largely of informing against loyal Norwegians who were trying to escape to Britain or otherwise assist the Allied cause, there was every reason to regard them as traitors against their own country. They were detained for the duration.21 There was one further Norwegian arrival in 1941. Svend Hammerun, who was Norwegian by birth but an American citizen, arrived from the United States in November 1941. He had been recruited by the Abwehr, who intended to use him as a double-cross agent. However, he developed cold feet and gave up the idea.22

  The next case, involving Alex Cappelen, did not occur until September 1942, and took a considerable time to resolve. Cappelen arrived in Stockholm earlier in the summer. He admitted to the Norwegian legation at the first opportunity there that he had joined the NS for a period in 1940, though was struck off when he did not pay his dues – but added more significantly that he had been a contact of Astrid Dollis, a notorious informer for the Germans.23 She had paid him NOK 6,000|||| and given him a mission to perform in Britain. However, the Security Service was informed that the Norwegian legation had evidence that when in Stockholm Cappelen had written a letter to Dollis, and had also visited some German offices. It was never possible to substantiate either of these allegations, and after a lengthy interrogation at Camp 020 Stephens judged that in the absence of any plausible evidence, there were no longer grounds for keeping him there. However, he could not be released to the Norwegian forces and so Stephens sought advice from Nagell as to what should be done. Nagell recommended that Cappelen should continue to be interned, and SIS took the same view – so he remained in detention until his deportation in June 1945.24

  It was not always easy for the Security Service to determine whether ISOS material could be depended upon to provide conclusive proof of an intention to commit espionage. One such case involved the Reidar, which arrived in Lerwick on 8 January 1943. ISOS information had already reported that a fishing smack of that name was due to leave Ålesund on an Abwehr mission. It strongly suggested that one of those on board was a German agent. Shortly afterwards, a further ISOS report revealed that in October 1942 the Abwehr office in Oslo had approved the expenditure of NOK 13,000*** on a ship purchase, and provided confirmation of a notification in late November that Reidar had been bought. All three crew members were therefore taken to Camp 020. Arnold Evensen quite quickly confessed that he had been a German agent for some time (actually since August 1942). Although there were initially divided opinions in B1 about the loyalty of the other two, it was eventually accepted that they were innocent and they were released.

  Evensen, who was of limited intelligence and had difficulty in telling his story both consistently and coherently, said that he was sent to Britain to be recruited as an agent and sent back to Norway with a transmitter. He maintained that what he really wanted to do was to return with two transmitters, one to hand over to the Germans, and one to operate on his own. He appeared to be trying to make out that he was acting as a sort of freelance double agent. The Security Service might have been inclined to believe this but for other rather fragmentary evidence showing that he had done something similar before, when trying to penetrate another organisation working for the Allies in Norway.††† So he remained under suspicion and they considered it quite probable that he was attempting ‘some sort of ingenious triple-cross’. This was never resolved, but the Camp 020 authorities eventually concluded that he was innocent, and had intended to declare that he had worked for the Germans, but now wanted to work against them, on arrival in Lerwick. They judged that there was no evidence that he wanted to spy, and that equity demanded that he should be released – but never put in a place from which he could contact the Germans again during the war. There were some strong disagreements about this, but Milmo and director-general Sir David Petrie finally accepted the recommendation. Evensen was found a job in Allardyce Bakeries, to which he was released in August 1943. The Norwegians were given a detailed copy of the final reports prepared by Camp 020, which were as usual sanitised with all indications of ISOS reporting being removed.25

  Nikolay Hansen, a Norwegian coal miner who spoke almost no English, arrived by parachute in Aberdeenshire on 30 September 1943 with material for secret writing hidden in his teeth, two wireless sets (one German and one British), £120‡‡‡ and a spade. He had been sentenced to twenty-one months in October 1942 for theft from the German naval stores where he was working, and after seven months was visited in prison by Lieutenant Winter of the Abwehr’s Bergen office. Hansen agreed to work for him to avoid the rest of his sentence. The original idea was that he should go to Svalbard and transmit weather reports, but then it was decided to send him to Britain. Hansen was not keen on this change of destination, but since the alternative was to go back to prison, he had no choice but to accept. He was told to bury the German set, and give himself up with the British set, saying that he had been trained as a spy but had no intention of working for Germans. Once the British authorities were convinced of his sincerity, he was to get himself a job as a miner, dig up the second transmitter and start reporting. He was tasked to obtain intelligence on military and naval matters, especially those concerning landing craft, convoy movements and aviation. If he had to reveal his second set, he was to report by secret writing to addresses in Sweden, and would receive instructions by radio, which Germans said could be picked up on an ordinary receiver – though Security Service experts said that this was impossible.

  On landing, Hansen gave himself up with both sets and because he admitted a connection with the Abwehr, he was sent to Camp 020.26 He claimed to have no intention of working for the Germans, but did not reveal the secret writing materials in his tooth. Even when this fact (though not the tooth) had been drawn from him, he repeatedly denied having been given a cover address. Under pressure, he eventually revealed this, then later disclosed that he had a second cover address for use with secret writing and, finally, that he had a third, which he claimed to have forgotten. He also admitted at a late stage that he had a further supply of secret writing material hidden elsewhere, and that the Germans had foreseen that he might have to give up both sets and had provided secret writing and cover addresses for this eventuality. Not surprisingly, it was judged that he was still acting on German instructions. He tried to explain away his failure to disclose the details of his secret writing by maintaining that the Germans had threatened to take reprisals against his wife if he did not. Prosecution of Hansen was considered, but it would have been necessary to include testimony from officers serving at Camp 020. The Security Service was of course reluctant to do this, but submitted the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who decided against proceedings.27

  How many Norwegian agents were there?

  How many attempts did the Germans make using Norwegians, or Norway as a base, to operate against the British? It is hard to make a conclusive judgement because they are not all easy to categorise. Although ISOS was generally able to provide compelling evidence, some cases were judged to be inconclusive. Moreover, there were others where a full investigation was not possible, but where there was a reasonable presumption of attempted espionage. One such case was described during a post-war interrogation of Horst Fanger, the Bergen-based Abwehr officer who had sent Brodersen to Britain.28 When he was interrogated in June 1945, Fanger named another of his agents, Henry Amland, stating that he was ready to go to England. However he claimed Amland
had disappeared at the last minute. This was contradicted by Borghild Marie Prestøy, who had worked for Fanger and provided him with facilities such as accommodation addresses. Prestøy said that she had helped Amland to leave by sending him to certain intermediaries who could arrange his passage. The first attempt had failed, but she thought the second in December 1943 had succeeded. He returned early in 1944. Prestøy was then arrested by the Germans for having been in touch with people who had come from Britain, but was held only briefly: she thought that Fanger had arranged her release. Fanger later confirmed to her that Amland had gone to Britain on his behalf. The summary report on the work of the Abwehr Bergen station stated that it had sent two agents to Britain in December 1943. One would have been Brodersen, and there is no ISOS evidence of another agent leaving Bergen in that month. Thus, while the evidence is inconclusive and there is nothing to show how and if Amland got to Britain, what he did there and how he got back, it seems at least quite possible that Fanger’s statement that Amland had ‘disappeared at the last minute’ was an attempt to protect him and that this may have been a case which was not picked up by ISOS.§§§