The Defence of the Realm (48 page)

In May 1940 SNOW's eight-month-old career as a double agent came close to disaster. His German case officer, Major Ritter, asked SNOW to meet him on a trawler in the North Sea and to bring along another potential Abwehr recruit who was then to proceed to Germany to be trained in sabotage and espionage. The bogus recruit chosen by B1a, the double-agent section of B Division, was a reformed petty criminal (codenamed BISCUIT) who had previously been used as an MI5 informant.
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SNOW and BISCUIT proved a nearly disastrous combination. Even before their
trawler left Grimsby, BISCUIT told his B1a case officer that SNOW had admitted ‘double-crossing us'.
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Once at sea, the two men had a violent quarrel. SNOW – at BISCUIT's insistence – was placed under guard in the cabin, and the trawler returned to Grimsby.
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On MI5 instructions SNOW sent a radio message to Ritter claiming that the trawler had turned up at the rendezvous but had become lost in North Sea fog. BISCUIT travelled to Lisbon, posing as a dealer in Portuguese wine, to meet Ritter and repeated the same excuse. Ritter seemed satisfied with the explanation, but confided in BISCUIT that, though SNOW's past performance had been excellent, he was now past his best.
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Running the SNOW case taught the Security Service vastly more than it had previously known about Abwehr operations. According to Dick White, it ‘saved us from absolute darkness on the subject of German espionage'.
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B1a was run by Thomas Argyll ‘Tar' Robertson, one of the Security Service's ablest agent-runners. Born in Sumatra in 1909 but brought up in Tonbridge and educated at Charterhouse and Sandhurst, Robertson had begun his career in the Seaforth Highlanders before working in the City in the early 1930s and joining the Security Service in 1933.
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Among his first assignments was mingling with sailors in pubs in the Cromarty Firth in order to assess their mood in the aftermath of the Invergordon Mutiny.
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In MI5 headquarters Robertson continued to wear his tartan Seaforth trews, thus earning the nickname ‘Passion Pants'.
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Tar's natural air of authority did not suffer from the nickname. Sir Michael Howard describes him as ‘a perfect officer type, who could have been played by Ronald Colman'.
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He had a remarkable gift for selecting case officers (all previously inexperienced wartime recruits) who were capable of entering into the personalities of their double agents. Tar later recalled that ‘one golden rule in running an agent was that his personality should be stamped on every message he transmitted' to the Abwehr.
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B1a staff were devoted to him and remained so for the rest of their lives. Reminiscing half a century later, one of them, Christopher Harmer, wrote to his former B1a colleague Hugh Astor: ‘Thank God for TAR I say. He gave us all our heads and encouraged us . . .'
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Robertson's judgement, though usually very good, was not, of course, infallible. At his first meeting in October 1941 with Jack Hooper, later discovered to be a former agent of both Soviet and German intelligence, Tar ‘formed a favourable opinion of him' and recommended that he be taken on trial.
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B1a's successes owed much to the leads provided by the ‘Beavers' in B1b, who analysed ISOS decrypts, Abwehr communications with the double agents and other intelligence relevant to the Double-Cross System.
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Headed initially by the future judge Helenus ‘Buster' Milmo, B1b contained some of the Security Service's most formidable intellects: among them Herbert Hart, later professor of jurisprudence at Oxford and principal of Brasenose College, and his fellow Oxford philosopher Patrick Day of New College. In August 1940 ISOS decrypts enabled the Beavers to give B1a advance warning of the imminent despatch of a new wave of Abwehr agents. The attempted expansion of the German agent network in Britain was part of the preparations for Operation
SEELÖWE
(‘SEALION'), the planned but never implemented German invasion of Britain. During the three months from September to November twenty-five agents landed by parachute or small boat, most of them inadequately trained and poorly equipped. The Security Service found them ‘an easy prey',
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all the easier to detect since some of their forged identity documents were based on misleading information supplied by MI5. In August SNOW provided the Abwehr, at its request, with names and numbers for a dozen forged identity cards; two months later he was asked for more.
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B1a rapidly turned four of the twenty-five German agents into double agents. Central to the turning process was the Security Service's wartime interrogation centre, Camp 020 (known within the Service as B1e), based in Latchmere House near Ham Common in west London and run by Captain (later Colonel) Robin ‘Tin-eye' Stephens. Tin-eye owed his nickname (never used to his face) to the monocle which seemed permanently glued to his right eye – he was rumoured to sleep in it. Born in 1900, he had spent fourteen years in the Indian army and political service, latterly working in the Judge Advocate's department. After returning to England in 1932, he went to Lincoln's Inn; though (for unknown reasons) not qualifying as a lawyer, he co-authored law books as well as working as a journalist. Like many other MI5 officers, Stephens was a keen sportsman, working from 1937 to 1939 for the National Fitness Council. He was also a good linguist, fluent in French, German and Italian, with an interpreter's qualification in Urdu and what he described as a ‘poor' knowledge of Somali and Amharic.
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He took a dim view of most Europeans. Italians were ‘undersized, posturing folk', Belgians overweight, ‘weeping and romantic', the French corrupt, Polish Jews ‘shifty' and Icelanders ‘unintelligent'. Stephens had a particular dislike of Germans. But, for all his ethnic prejudices, he proved a remarkable judge of individual character. ‘National Characteristics in spies', he acknowledged, ‘are inconclusive . . . The interrogator must treat each spy as a very individual case . . . a very personal enemy.'
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In January 1941, the London Reception Centre (LRC) was established at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth to act as a screening
centre for aliens arriving from enemy territory. In the course of the war, approximately 33,000 refugees passed through the LRC (known in the Security Service as B1d), where they were questioned about their methods of escape, the routes they had followed, safe houses, couriers, helpers and documentation. Their statements were meticulously indexed and crosschecked against those of their companions and earlier arrivals. Intelligence was extracted and circulated to Whitehall departments. Any inconsistencies in their stories were rigorously followed up. Though SIS and SOE officers were also present at the LRC, MI5 reserved the right to carry out the first interview. As Dick White put it, the function of the LRC was to separate the ‘sheep from the goats'.
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The goats – those suspected of being Axis agents – were transferred to Camp 020.

Camp 020's first major contribution to the construction of the Double-Cross System was to turn, in the space of only a few days, two of the first wave of Abwehr agents, codenamed SUMMER and TATE (both Scandinavians), who landed in England in September 1940. SUMMER was caught soon after landing by parachute in the Northamptonshire countryside in the early hours of 6 September by a farmhand who found him asleep in a ditch, together with his parachute, radio transmitter, £200 in banknotes, a false identity card and a loaded pistol. During interrogation at Camp 020, Stephens assessed him as ‘a fanatical Nazi'. Within two days, however, SUMMER had agreed to work as a double agent in return for a promise that the life of his friend TATE would be spared. This was the only time in the history of Camp 020 that such a promise was made to a prisoner. It proved to be the key to the recruitment of TATE, who was dropped by parachute in the Cambridgeshire fens in the early hours of 20 September. As SUMMER had done, he landed heavily, spraining an ankle, and quickly aroused suspicion when he hobbled into the village of Willingham, wearing a smart blue suit. When arrested, TATE was found in possession of both a genuine Danish passport in his own name and a forged British identity card in the name of ‘Williams'. The interrogation of TATE at Camp 020 followed a quite different pattern from that of SUMMER. He claimed to have landed by boat from Denmark three weeks earlier, fleeing persecution by the Germans – in the process infuriating a military intelligence officer from MI9, Colonel Alexander Scotland, who was present at the interrogation.
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The sequel is described in Guy Liddell's diary for 22 September:

I have just been told that the officer from MI9 who was present at the interrogation of TATE yesterday took it upon himself to manhandle the prisoner without saying
anything to Colonel Stephens, Dick White or Malcolm Frost [all of MI5]. The interrogation broke off at lunchtime, when Colonel Alexander Scotland left the room. Frost, wondering where he was, followed him and eventually found him in the prisoner's cell. He was hitting TATE in the jaw and I think got one back for himself. Frost stopped this without making a scene, and later told me what had happened. It was quite clear to me that we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the whole thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not work in the long run. We are taking the matter up with DMI [Director of Military Intelligence] and propose to say that we do not intend to have that particular military intelligence officer on the premises any more.
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Henceforth all interrogations, save on some matters of technical detail, were conducted exclusively by Camp 020 officers.
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Stephens remained completely opposed to physical violence during interrogation (a principle later restated by the post-war Security Service). Guy Liddell noted an example of his punctiliousness. One of the officers at 020 was a qualified dentist, who carried out any dental work required at the camp, which occasionally included extracting a secret ink capsule hidden in a hollow tooth. Before doing so, the dentist would first obtain the prisoner's written consent.
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Stephens was, however, a firm believer in the use of psychological pressure to isolate the prisoner, intimidate him and demonstrate his powerlessness.
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Potential double agents were told they could either work for the British or be sent for trial and hanged. Of the 440 people despatched to Camp 020, only fourteen were executed; Stephens was disappointed there were not more.
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He was also a strong advocate of deception as a tool of the interrogator. The information given by SUMMER to gain a guarantee that TATE's life would be spared, including details of the arrangements for them to meet at the Black Boy Inn at Nottingham, was used to persuade TATE that his friend had betrayed him. TATE, wrote Stephens, ‘lost all his previous composure, cursed “the swine [SUMMER]” and blurted out that he would tell the whole truth. He held back little.'
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After only two days' interrogation,
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TATE began a career as the longest-serving of all B1a's double agents, exchanging wireless messages with the Abwehr in Hamburg continuously from October 1940 until May 1945. His German controllers described him as a ‘pearl' among agents, sent him large sums of money and had him awarded the Iron Cross, both First and Second Class.
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In the course of the Second World War, B1a, which usually had five case officers, ran a total of nearly 120 double agents. On average, five of its officers were running twenty-five agents at any one time.
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Only six double
agents were German nationals. The Abwehr deployed against Britain agents of thirty-four different nationalities. Though only eleven of the double agents were turned by Camp 020, they included some of the most successful: among them (in addition to TATE and SUMMER) the Briton Eddie Chapman (ZIGZAG) and the Norwegian Helge John Niel Moe (MUTT).
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Though the Security Service retained the lead role in the Double-Cross System, its successful expansion depended on an unprecedented degree of collaboration within the British intelligence community, on a scale and with a sophistication not matched by any other wartime power. ISOS decrypts from GC&CS led directly to the capture of five of the twenty-three German agents despatched to the UK during 1941, identified two more and provided valuable guidance in devising the disinformation with which the double agents deceived the Abwehr.
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In December 1941 the veteran codebreaker ‘Dilly' Knox, though terminally ill with cancer, succeeded in breaking the Abwehr variant of the Enigma cipher. The decrypts were given the codename ISK (Intelligence Service Knox) to distinguish them from the ISOS decrypts of Abwehr hand cipher messages, which had been circulated for the past twenty months. Most recipients, however, did not understand the distinction and referred to all Abwehr decrypts as ISOS. By the spring of 1942, Tar Robertson was able to state categorically, on the basis of the intelligence derived from the decrypts, that the Security Service controlled all German agents operating in Britain.
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ULTRA provided crucial evidence that the Germans were successfully deceived by much of the disinformation fed to them by their turned agents.

The Double-Cross System also involved SIS, which both recruited and assisted double agents in neutral capitals. Its first major recruit was Dušan ‘Duško' Popov, a young Yugoslav working for the Abwehr who contacted the SIS station at Belgrade. In December 1940 Popov travelled to London via Lisbon, telling the Abwehr that he was going to collect intelligence from a friend in the Yugoslav legation but with the real intention of making contact with MI5. Codenamed TRICYCLE because of his fondness for three-in-a-bed sex, Popov became the centre of a considerable network of agents, some imaginary (invented by B1a). After the war he was given British citizenship and presented with the OBE by Robertson at an informal ceremony in the bar of the Ritz.
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