The Defence of the Realm (49 page)

Like TRICYCLE, the Catalan businessman Juan Pujol Garcia (GARBO), the most successful of all the double agents run by B1a, began as an SIS recruit. Pujol, whose experience of the Spanish Civil War had left him with a loathing of both Fascism and Communism, first offered his
services to the British in Madrid in January 1941 but was turned down. He then approached the Abwehr, told them he was travelling to England, and was eventually taken on as Agent ARABEL. Pujol got no further than Lisbon, from where, claiming to be in England, he despatched to the Abwehr plentiful disinformation on non-existent British troop and naval movements, spiced with details of ‘drunken orgies and slack morals at amusement centres' in Liverpool and the surprising revelation that Glasgow dock-workers would ‘do anything for a litre of wine'. By February 1942 Section V (counter-intelligence) of SIS had identified Pujol as the author of these colourful reports, which were decrypted by Bletchley Park. A month later SIS recruited him as a double agent.
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By cutting across the demarcation line which confined MI5 to British soil and SIS to foreign territory, the double agents necessitated closer operational co-operation between the two Services than ever before. Unsurprisingly, the collaboration did not always run smoothly. In March 1942 Felix Cowgill, the head of SIS Section V, told Liddell that he wished to bring GARBO to London to be debriefed in SIS headquarters but wanted a guarantee that the Security Service would then allow GARBO to return to Lisbon to be run by SIS. Liddell was outraged:

[Cowgill] did not wish to give [GARBO] up or to allow us to have access to him even though in all our interests it might be better that he should remain here. Fundamentally, his attitude is ‘I do not see why I should get agents and then have them pinched by you.' The whole thing is so narrow and petty that it really makes me furious.
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Liddell won the interdepartmental battle which followed. Since Pujol's reports to the Abwehr claimed that he and his partially mythical agent network were based in Britain, it made better sense for him to be run by the Security Service in London than by SIS in Lisbon. On 24 April GARBO arrived in London and was transferred to the control of B1a.
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Relations with Cowgill remained tense. B Division, which had hitherto believed it was receiving all ISOS and ISK Abwehr decrypts, discovered in April 1942 that Cowgill had been withholding all those which mentioned SIS agents – in all over a hundred decrypts, including some reports from Pujol. Though the Security Service had got on well with the previous head of Section V, Valentine Vivian, it found Cowgill difficult to deal with. So did some other sections of the intelligence community. Commander Ewen Montagu, the naval intelligence representative on the newly established Twenty Committee, complained to Tar Robertson that Cowgill was possessed of a ‘pathological inability to inform anyone of anything that he can
possibly avoid'.
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Kim Philby told Herbert Hart of B1b ‘how he had argued with Major Cowgill that the secret abstraction of these messages from the circulation of ISOS and ISK was quite wrong, since it mutilated the total series, and in any case some of the considerable amount of information in these messages might reasonably be held to concern us'.
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Cowgill was eventually overridden by ‘C', Stewart Menzies, who assured Masterman on 11 June that all decrypts relevant to double agents would henceforth be passed to the Twenty Committee.
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In order to run double agents successfully, B1a needed to have available a mixture of information and disinformation with which they could both impress and deceive German case officers. In January 1941 the Wireless Board (also known as the W Board) was set up to decide what to tell the Abwehr. On it sat Guy Liddell (who had succeeded Harker as head of B Division), Stewart Menzies and the three service directors of intelligence. This elevated committee, while considering broad policy issues, inevitably lacked the time to provide the detailed, sometimes daily, operational guidance which became necessary following the expansion of the Double-Cross System in the autumn and winter of 1940.
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The Wireless Board therefore quickly delegated day-to-day selection of information and disinformation to the Twenty Committee, so called because the roman numeral for twenty (XX) is a double cross. The Committee, which had representatives from the Security Service, SIS, the War Office, the three service intelligence departments, GHQ Home Forces and, when necessary, other interested departments, began meeting in January 1941 and thereafter met weekly for the remainder of the war.
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The MI5 chairman of the Twenty Committee, the Oxford history don J. C. Masterman (later knighted), was, like the two other key figures in the Double-Cross System, Robertson and Stephens, an inspired choice. Born in 1891, Masterman was considerably older than most other B1a officers, and owed his recruitment in November 1940 to Dick White, who had been his pupil at Christ Church. While a young fellow of Christ Church, Masterman was studying in Germany in August 1914, and was interned for the remainder of the war.
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He first came to the Security Service's attention as the result of an officious postal censor who in August 1918 reported to the Chief Constable of Hampshire that Masterman's mother had been ordering ‘suspicious books' from a Dutch bookshop to be sent to her son during his internment. Kell was subsequently informed that the books, mainly poetry and on the origins of the war, had been ordered by Masterman himself with a request for the bill to be sent to his mother. No further investigation followed.
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As well as being an academic, Masterman was probably the best allround games player ever to join the Security Service. As an undergraduate he had won an athletics Blue. Between the wars he played hockey and tennis for England and at the age of forty-six was still a good enough cricketer to tour Canada with the MCC.
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In his reports on the Double-Cross System, Masterman sometimes used cricketing analogies. ‘Running a team of double agents', he believed, ‘is very like running a club cricket side. Older players lose their form and are gradually replaced by newcomers.' He compared the leading double agents to well-known cricketers: ‘If in the double-cross world SNOW was the W. G. Grace of the early period, then GARBO was certainly the Bradman of the later years.'
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Though there were some tensions when Masterman rejected risky proposals from the young case officers of B1a, he won the respect of all and, at least in retrospect, they conceded that his caution was necessary.
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Guy Liddell noted at the end of the war: ‘Apart from his ability he is an extremely delightful personality and has been liked by us all.'
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Masterman was also an excellent chairman. He preceded the first meeting of the Twenty Committee with what he later called ‘a small but important decision, to wit that tea and a bun should always be provided for members':

In days of acute shortage and of rationing the provision of buns was no easy task, yet by hook or crook (and mostly by crook) we never failed to provide them throughout the war years. Was this simple expedient one of the reasons why attendance at the Committee was nearly always a hundred per cent?

Despite some early tension between MI5 and SIS and the difficulties of reconciling the sometimes conflicting interests of deception, security and intelligence-gathering, the Twenty Committee worked remarkably smoothly. Masterman had a gift for creating consensus. At only one of its 226 meetings was a disagreement pressed to a vote.
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From its very first meeting it began to suspect the astonishing truth that, in Masterman's words,
‘we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country'
. The Abwehr's instructions to SUMMER and TATE in the autumn of 1940 suggested, even if they did not prove, that the only German agents then operating in Britain had already been turned by the Security Service. The B1a-controlled SNOW network was asked to act as SUMMER's paymaster, and TATE was given contact details of the double agent RAINBOW.
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Though the Twenty Committee and B1a remained alert to the possibility that there were German agents at large outside its control, it did not occur to either that the Security Service itself – had been penetrated by two of the Abwehr's previously most successful agents.
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Though Folkert van Koutrik and Jack Hooper chose to remain inactive, both were a serious potential threat to the Double-Cross System.

Despite their ignorance of van Koutrik and Hooper, however, the Twenty Committee and B1a were acutely aware of how easily the System could go wrong. In January 1941, SUMMER, who was living under guard in a house near Cambridge, attempted to escape. He attacked the only guard on duty, telling him unhelpfully, ‘It hurts me more than it hurts you,' tied him up and tried to make his getaway on a motorbike belonging to another guard. Strapped to the motorbike was a canoe in which SUMMER planned, optimistically, to cross to the continent. ‘Fortunately', wrote Masterman, ‘the motorbike, being government property, was not very efficiently maintained,' and broke down.
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The MI5 Regional Security Liaison Officer (RSLO) in Cambridge reported to Dick White that the pursuit of SUMMER was quickly over:

At the first cross roads we came to we met some roadmen who stated that they had seen a man on a motorcycle carrying a canoe turn left down the Newmarket Road. We proceeded until we got to Pampisford Station, where we met Mr F. Brown, a roadman of Pampisford, who said that he had seen the man on the motorcycle with the canoe – in fact he had seen a lot of him because the man on the motorcycle had fallen off just by him and he had helped the man to throw the canoe over a hedge.
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SUMMER was caught soon afterwards and his career as a double agent brought to an abrupt conclusion. Comic-opera though his escape attempt was, it emphasized the danger that a successful escape could undermine the whole Double-Cross System.

B1a strongly suspected that SUMMER was not the only double agent who, if the opportunity presented itself, might well return to the German side. Elaborate plans were therefore made to remove most to secret locations in North Wales in the event of a German invasion, which early in 1941 was still regarded as a real possibility. The operation was initially codenamed ‘Mr Mills' Circus' in honour of the B1a officer originally put in charge, the Old Harrovian and Cambridge engineering graduate Cyril Mills, son of Britain's leading circus-owner, Bertram Mills. The officer responsible for the North Wales end of the operation, Captain P. E. S. Finney, sometimes used circus metaphors in his correspondence with Head Office, writing from Colwyn Bay in April 1941: ‘I have now completed arrangements for the accommodation of the animals, the young and their keepers, together with accommodation for Mr Mills himself.' All were to be housed in hotels at Betws-y-Coed, Llanrwst and Llandudno, whose owners had been vetted.
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The top priority of ‘Mr Mills' Circus' was SUMMER's friend TATE, who, it was believed, ‘would probably attempt to escape in case of an invasion'.
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Next came SNOW who, in Masterman's cricketing metaphor, had hitherto ‘always batted at number one' but slipped down the batting order in January 1941 after a visit to Lisbon to meet his German case officer, Major Nikolaus Ritter (alias ‘Dr Rantzau'). The main purpose of SNOW's meeting with Ritter was to introduce him to CELERY, an MI5 agent posing as a new recruit to the Abwehr's agent network. On his return from Lisbon, however, SNOW claimed that he had been accused by Ritter of double-crossing him and had admitted doing so. But there were many contradictions in SNOW's account, which did not square with CELERY's version of the trip. In the end, B1a concluded that the most likely explanation was ‘that SNOW had not in fact been “rumbled” at all, but had invented this part of the story because the complications of his position were getting too much for him'.
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SNOW, it was believed, was so confused about his loyalties that it was difficult to determine whether he was ‘(a) genuinely friendly to this country, or (b) really pro-German, or (c) anxious to work with both sides and come out on the right side in the end'. A German invasion, however, would almost certainly resolve SNOW's mental confusion: ‘As he is a great believer in German efficiency, it is highly probable that he would attempt to join the Germans immediately if invasion occurred. He should therefore be arrested on the first news of invasion and transferred to a safer part of the country . . .'
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SNOW's case officers also found him personally tiresome, with disagreeably plebeian habits which included ‘only wearing his false teeth when eating'.
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Some of the double agents, notably GW, were trusted to make their own way to North Wales in the event of a German invasion and given car passes, petrol coupons and money for their journeys.
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Those who were not trusted, TATE and SNOW chief among them, were to be handcuffed and taken by car under armed escort to their chosen hotel. The handcuffs (later returned) were loaned by Scotland Yard.
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Tar Robertson informed Tin-eye Stephens: ‘If there is any danger of the more dangerous cases falling into enemy hands they will be liquidated forcibly' –in other words, shot. If any one of them was able to contact the enemy, it ‘could blow our whole show'.
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The DG, Sir David Petrie, personally instructed TATE's escort: ‘As it is of vital importance that TATE should not fall into the hands of the enemy, you must be prepared to take any step necessary to prevent this from occurring.'
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This and similar instructions to the escorts of other double agents are the only known occasions on which a DG has authorized executions (though in the event none was carried out). The legal justification
was presumably that any double agent attempting to assist an invading army would have been regarded as, in effect, an enemy combatant.
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As fear of a German invasion receded, ‘Mr Mills' Circus' gradually wound down. Even TATE, though still not fully trusted, was regarded as unlikely to change sides once there was no longer any serious prospect of a German invasion. The untrustworthy SNOW, however, was imprisoned in Dartmoor and stayed there for the rest of the war.