Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (46 page)

Those surviving supplied only just enough fuel to keep up the V-2 bombardment. It sufficed, nonetheless, to sustain a diminishing delivery of rockets until 27 March 1945. What permitted the V-2 firing batteries’ survival was their brilliantly simple method of operation. It took only fifteen minutes to position the Meillerwagen—it might be in a suburban street—and push the missile erect. Tanker trucks then fuelled it, while a mobile generator was linked by cable to supply power. The crew then took cover in a slit trench which had been dug while installation took place. The command team, in an armoured vehicle, finally initiated the launch procedure; fifty-four seconds after ignition the site was ready for evacuation. An hour after arrival the Meillerwagen could be on its way. Little surprise that, though the Allied Expeditionary Air Forces flew missions to catch the V-2 teams in the act, none was successful.

The only other means considered to reduce the weight of the V-2 attack was the use of deception, by a variation, much celebrated in the post-war literature of espionage, of the management of human intelligence. Throughout the war, the Germans infiltrated agents into Britain: about 70 before 1940, some being “agents in place” before war broke out; another 220 arrived during the war, of whom 120 were intended to make their way to other countries. The Germans were able to organise infiltration at this level because a steady stream of escapees from occupied Europe, 7,000 to 9,000 a year, the vast majority seeking to join their own armies-in-exile, reached Britain by one means of emigration or another.
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The British counter-espionage services collared almost every agent who arrived hidden among this annual stream. Only three are known to have eluded detection and only five others, once identified, refused to confess. Out of those apprehended, the British were able to form a body of double agents, some of whom had radio sets supplied by the Abwehr or other means of communication with base; one at least, code-named Tricycle by the British, was so trusted that he was allowed to journey to Lisbon during the war to consult his German controllers. Until 1944 the double agents did little more than feed German wishful thinking with reports of depressed morale in the besieged island, though some assisted preparations for D-Day by reinforcing German belief in false orders of battle. As with almost all human intelligence operations at low level, the day-to-day reporting of the double agents was of banal, mundane detail. It differed little from the material fed to controllers by the war’s numerous intelligence fraudsters who, operating on their own account for one side or the other or both, had correctly detected in the appetite of intelligence organisations for information of any sort the means of making a living.
Whitaker’s Almanac,
the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
old newspapers, the BBC World Service—all grist to the world of such fantasists’ “product.” Eminent among the crew was the man code-named Garbo by the British, who set out to sell himself to the Germans as a pro-Nazi British resident. Operating at the outset exclusively from Lisbon, he assured his Abwehr controllers that “there are men here in Glasgow who would do anything for a litre of wine.” Then, transferring his double loyalties to the British, he arrived in his notional operational area to set up a network of twenty-seven completely fictitious agents, whose expenses, paid to him in cash by the Abwehr, eventually amounted to £31,000. At the end of the war he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire and retired into private life unharmed by the enforcement agencies of either of his paymasters.
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Garbo (in real life Juan Piyol Garcia, a Spanish citizen) supplied the Germans, when he was not allegedly organising the sabotage activities of Welsh nationalist fanatics, with enormous quantities of information, all carefully distorted by his British controllers, about the domestic affairs of the United Kingdom under German attack. It was absolutely natural, therefore, that the Germans should turn to him for first-hand information on the effects of the V-weapon campaign. The approach led to one of the most troubled passages in British intelligence management during the war. As early as January 1941, the various intelligence authorities, by then persuaded, correctly, that there were no German agents left at liberty and at work within the United Kingdom, decided to set up an organisation (soon known as the Twenty Committee, after the appropriate Roman numeral, XX, or double cross) which would deceive the German masters of controlled agents—whether they had been captured and turned or had deliberately turned themselves in—by relaying falsified information. The aim, as defined by J. A. Marriott, one of the directors of the Twenty Committee, would be to supply the Germans with “so much inaccurate information that the intelligence reports furnished by the Abwehr to the German High Command based on that information would themselves be misleading and wrong.”
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What ensued verifies the accuracy—in spirit if not exactness—of anything the best writers of spy fiction, John le Carré foremost, portray about the workings of the organisations they describe. The inner ring of the Twenty Committee’s operatives included, beside Garbo and Tricycle, who were exceptional, Brutus, a Polish air force officer escapee, and Mutt and Jeff, two Norwegian escapees who had reached Britain by boat, all three real people infiltrated under Abwehr auspices, but also the entirely fictitious Mullet and Puppet, venal British businessmen, Balloon, an army officer embittered by dismissal from the service, and Bronx and Gelatine, two ladies with friends respectively in the Foreign Office and the armed forces. The latters’ friends were extraordinarily lax about the safeguarding of official papers, whose contents duly made their way back to Berlin, but all of the Twenty Committee’s people did their bit. Most of what they communicated was “chicken feed”—true but useless tittle-tattle—but the identification, particularly by Garbo, of nonexistent Allied divisions before D-Day contributed significantly to the misappreciation by the German Foreign Armies West office of where the Allies intended to land.

It was with the appearance of the V-weapons, however, that the double-cross system achieved its most sophisticated effects, though at the price of heavy heart-searching at the highest level of British government. Soon after the flying bombs began to fall, it was realised that, by relaying false reports of their accuracy, it would be possible to persuade the Germans to shorten their range, thus shifting the Mean Point of Impact (MPI) south and east of Tower Bridge, believed to be the Germans’ chosen MPI, towards the open countryside on the fringe of London. The Germans themselves were eager for news of where the bombs fell and had actually ordered Garbo, before the campaign began, to leave London so that he could report damage in safety. He was sent details of a reporting technique—Brutus and the fictitious Tate were similarly instructed—which would relate the explosion of the pilotless weapons to time of impact. The British realised that by giving details of flying-bomb arrivals correct as to time but wrong as to place—too far to the north or west—they could cause the Germans to shift the MPI away from London’s crowded centre towards its less densely populated suburbs, so diminishing both casualties and destruction. The policy was hotly debated at Cabinet level, where allegations of “playing God” were levelled, but prevailed. It was continued during the V-2 rocket offensive and it seems to have had an effect. Ironically, during the flying-bomb offensive, the Germans were chiefly misled not by double-cross agents but by a man operating on his own account, known to the British as Ostro, located in Madrid and selling “facts” to the Germans based on newspaper reports and his own imagination. Among his achievements was a report (believed) of the destruction of Big Ben; Ostro was a self-creation of whom any spy novelist would have been proud. His information appeared to be confirmed by a Luftwaffe photographic reconnaissance flight of 6 September 1944, the first flown since January 1941, which allowed Flak Regiment 155 (W), the flying-bomb launching unit, to take credit for all the damage revealed.
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The double-cross system does seem to have shifted the MPI of the V-2 rockets away from the aiming point. Treasure, a mysterious double-agent under the Twenty Committee’s control, sent reports during October which appear to have persuaded the Germans to shift the MPI away from east-central London down the line of the Thames estuary. The British official historian concludes that, but for that alteration, “1,300 more people would probably have been killed, 10,000 more injured and 23,000 houses damaged—to say nothing of the disruption to the economy and disruption of the country which would have resulted from the concentration of destruction which the Germans believed they were achieving between Westminster and the docks.”
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So “spying,” in the popular sense of the term, did at least play its part in British resistance to the V-weapons campaign. It was only one part, however, of a remarkably varied intelligence effort, including not only humint of several distinct sorts—the anonymous treachery of the Oslo Report, double-agency, resistance reporting and direct espionage—but also what today is called “national technical means,” in the form of photographic reconnaissance, as well as sigint and a great deal of theoretical analysis.

To assess the relative importance of the different elements of the intelligence plot is not easy. Clearly the significance of the Oslo Report was very great; though less than specific in many aspects, it did indicate the trend of German military scientific research—towards, in particular, guided and pilotless weapons—and what it did not mention was as significant as what it did. It included, for example, no suggestion that Nazi Germany was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, and given the belated, weak and diffuse espousal of a nuclear programme by the Nazi state, it was accurate in that respect. On the other hand, the Oslo Report, after arousing initial interest, was almost forgotten, for several years after 1939. Only when other intelligence, received at the end of 1942, alerted the British to rumours of pilotless weapon development was the report resurrected. Perhaps the most valuable clue it then provided was the reference to Peenemünde as a testing site.

What precipitated the search for harder evidence of pilotless weapons was, so we must believe from the official account, a piece of pure John Buchanism. Readers of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
will remember how Scudder, the hunted American, tells Richard Hannay how he detected the evil behind the Black Stone. “I got my first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me enquiring and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Stranger’s Club in Vienna, and in a little bookshop off the Racknitz-Strasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence ten days ago in Paris.” According to the British official history, the first substantial report of “rockets” was received, on 18 December 1942, by SIS (MI6) from a chemical engineer “who was travelling extensively on his firm’s business.” Neither he nor his nationality is identified, but he had apparently overheard “a conversation in a Berlin restaurant between a Professor Fauner [a Professor Forner was known to exist] of the Berlin Technische Hochschule and an engineer, Stefan Szenassy.”
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They discussed a rocket carrying five tons of explosive with a range of 200 kilometres. The chemical engineer, under SIS prompting, produced two more reports of the rocket’s characteristics, including the detail that it was tested at Swinemünde (near Peenemünde).

The “chemical engineer” then disappears from the record, reinforcing the suspicion, held by numbers of historians of Nazi Germany, that the Nazi state contained more well-placed sympathisers with the Allied cause than the danger of discovery by the Gestapo would suggest; there are numbers of “de-Nazifications” after 1945, restorations to public position, restitution of fortune that are otherwise inexplicable.
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The chemical engineer deserved whatever reward events subsequently brought, for the convenient juxtaposition of his table with Professor Fauner’s in the Berlin restaurant in December 1942 led directly to the decision to subject Peenemünde to close photographic reconnaissance, to repeated overflights and thus to the great bombing raid of 17–18 August 1943.

It has been suggested that the Peenemünde raid should have been staged earlier, should have been better organised or should have been repeated. Counsels of perfection: not until mid-1943 was the photographic evidence clear enough to identify the site as the centre of the German secret weapons programme (there were other candidate sites, at Kummersdorf and Rechlin). The raid, though missing parts of the site through failures of marking, all too familiar to Bomber Command, did terrible damage and resulted in the transfer of much of the research and production programme to other, more remote or less vulnerable sites, in central and southern Germany and deep within Poland. To repeat the operation, even had Peenemünde remained a “target-rich” objective, would have been very costly. That of 17–18 August 1943 brought the loss of 40 aircraft, out of 600, an attrition rate of 7 per cent, considerably higher than was deemed “acceptable” by Bomber Command.

Thereafter, there was little that the intelligence services could do. They had identified the threat and had directed the offence to the point of danger. Once the Germans, in reaction to the great Peenemünde raid, had removed the substance of the secret weapons programme from harm’s way, the intelligence services could only, after an effort to predict the date of the opening of the campaign, attempt to put the Germans off their aim. In that, through the double-cross system, they had a certain success.

Honours in the V-weapons campaign, if that word can be used about a method of making war on civilians, go to the Germans. Both the V-1, the first cruise missile, and the V-2, the direct technical ancestor of all extra-atmospheric missiles and of the space rockets, were far in advance of any aeronautical weapon produced by their enemies in 1939–45. Wernher von Braun, who was to become an American citizen and to be celebrated as “the father of the space programme,” was a scientific genius. The men who produced the V-1 were aeronautical technicians of the first class. Had Hitler had the vision to devote a proportion of Germany’s scientific effort similar to that given to other weapon programmes to nuclear weapons, it is possible that, with the V-weapons, he could have won the war. The Nazi nuclear research programme was dissipated between too many competing research organisations. There was no Dornberger, no von Braun, no Peenemünde and never enough money.
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The world, nevertheless, had a very narrow escape.