Secret Alliances Read online

  GC&CS files provide a remarkably complete picture of the extent of British knowledge about Abwehr structures, including their organisation in Norway, personnel, buildings and even their telephone directories as well as details of many of their Norwegian agents. They also describe Abwehr preparations to deal with British raids, sabotage and intelligence operations. A report in April 1942 sets out the extra steps they were taking to obtain early warning of enemy intentions and trace agents equipped with wireless sets – by increasing the number of their own small stations equipped with wireless, recruiting more agents to act as coastal watchers and increasing the number of direction finding stations to track such transmissions.26

  The first operational use of ISOS

  Although much of the value of ISOS and ISK lay in their counter-espionage potential, they first showed their usefulness by enabling a series of operations to be mounted to disrupt German attempts to establish weather stations on Svalbard, Jan Mayen and elsewhere in the Arctic. Information from such stations, together with that from weather trawlers, could be of great importance in supplementing reporting from weather reconnaissance flights. After the Abwehr hand cypher was broken in March 1940, ISOS intelligence provided NID with a very detailed picture of German planning. The NID history states that the reports

  revealed the incompetence and self-seeking nature of the various groups of Abwehr personnel as well as their insane jealousy of each other. This last trait was manifest right up to the level of Goering himself. He intervened personally to help get arrangements through and do down a rival group who were also planning operations.27

  ISOS enabled the Fridtjof Nansen to capture a group of armed Danes who had landed in East Greenland at the end of April 1940. A few months later the same ship intercepted a second party and forced a third ship to return to Norway. Shortly afterwards, it disrupted another attempt to land an armed party on Greenland. In November, the Fridtjof Nansen was herself wrecked when trying to interdict Heinrich Freese, a trawler which was taking a group of Germans to Jan Mayen, but the trawler was captured by the cruiser Naiad.28 This group included Count Ulrich von Finckenstein, an Abwehr officer working in Oslo, who had been involved in some of the previous attempts to land weather reporting stations in the Arctic. He was captured, brought to England and interned. His Abwehr connection was finally confirmed by a Dane, Børresen, whom he had sent to Britain in August 1940, who revealed that von Finckenstein was a member of the Stettin Abwehr. After this von Finckenstein talked freely and provided some valuable information.29 There was a further successful interception, of the Buskø in 1941, but after August 1942 further German attempts to land weather stations on Svalbard or Greenland were carried out under naval command. GC&CS could not read those naval cyphers and the landings were successful for the following two years.30

  ISOS occasionally provided other insights. For example, it revealed that the Germans had been obtaining reports about British activities from the Swedes, which initially appeared to have originated from Denham, the British naval attaché, or from his office. Investigations showed that most of the material would not have been available to Denham, and it was concluded that the Swedish naval attaché in London, Count Oxenstierna, was responsible. He was eventually asked to leave at the end of 1943, and was the only neutral naval attaché to be expelled from Britain during the war.|||| In the course of the investigation of the naval attaché, it was discovered in October 1943 that Roscher Lund had been making an arrangement to obtain information from Oxenstierna which he was not directly disclosing to the British. NID did not take this further, because they concluded that there was nothing anti-British about it, and that he was doing it for his own purposes.31

  Abwehr operations in Germany and other German intelligence and security agencies were not so vulnerable to GC&CS investigations. In fact, it was only after the war that SIS discovered that the Abwehr had succeeded in penetrating the Swedish legation in Berlin, by recruiting a confidential secretary who passed them copies of reports which were sent by the legation to the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm. These included information obtained by the Swedes on the development of new weapons, German economic and industrial potential, and air raid damage. When passing this information to the Security Service, SIS made no mention of cypher materials. The operation lasted from 1941 until 1944, when presumably the secretary was posted back to Stockholm.32 There was nothing – in the SIS report at least – to indicate that any cyphers had been compromised.

  Warnings to agents

  In addition to providing intelligence to help detect German espionage attempts in Britain, ISOS could also help to protect the security of Allied agents operating abroad. If an agent was under suspicion or worse, in danger of arrest, a hint of this could often appear in Abwehr traffic with just enough notice for a warning to be sent to the SIS or SOE agent concerned. There were times, though, when the risk of compromising ISOS had to be weighed against the value of an agent’s work, and in some cases an agent would have to be left unwarned and take his chance. (The SOE Security Section history noted that until early 1943, there was not the same collaboration and liaison between SOE, SIS and the Security Service on espionage and the protection of agents in the field, as existed later. The history concluded that the need for this collaboration had not been foreseen. ‘If a section had been created in SOE earlier than 1943 to specialise in operational security and to study enemy counter-espionage methods, aided by the information in possession of SIS and the Security Service, some of the later penetration might have been avoided’.33) Chapter 5 explores such an example, when a suitably disguised warning was sent to Nagell about the imminent danger to two SOE agents in Bergen, who had been compromised following the confession of a captured SOE agent. But ISOS could also provide more general warnings too, as the following example from a fortnightly update from 1943 shows:34

  At this time last year, by means of agents in Gothenburg itself and a number of fishing smacks specially equipped to operate in the Kattegat, the enemy kept close watch on the Norwegian ships then preparing to run the gauntlet to England. MSS material shows that the Abwehrstelle at Copenhagen is again using fishing smacks to keep an eye on the Norwegian vessels Dicto and Lionel lying in Gothenburg. SOE, who were considering an attempt to get these vessels to the UK, have been warned.***

  MSS material reported that the Nordfahrt had been damaged by an explosion while lying at Thamshavn. The German authorities suspect sabotage and a strict surveillance of all boats in the area has been put into force.†††

  There were clear indications in the MSS material that German Intelligence are able to decypher the codes used by certain of the SOE agents in Norway. Lark is a specific instance.‡‡‡

  In late 1944 the Norwegians started to obtain reports based on telephone interception of conversations between the SD, Statspoliti (the NS police) and Gestapo. In a revealing exchange, Keith Liversidge, of Section V of SIS, wrote to Roscher Lund to suggest that the intercept material be given the culturally appropriate codenames of ‘Ibsen’ and ‘Grieg’. He also proposed some fairly wide-ranging restrictions on the use which could be made of the reports. Although they were to be copied to the Norwegian legation in Stockholm, he recommended that no action be taken there on them, and that any action should only be initiated by Roscher Lund in London:

  ‘This suggestion may seem hard on individuals about to be arrested when a warning from Stockholm could possibly save them. But the Home Front as a whole will benefit more from the continuance of this material and I fear, if necessary, that individuals must therefore be sacrificed.’§§§ It was vital that the source should be safeguarded and that the Germans should not become aware of the leakage. In his reply, Roscher Lund accepted most of Liversidge’s suggestions, but disagreed with this one, commenting ‘we can hardly prevent the people in Norway from taking action when they feel it is necessary to save lives. You must remember that it is not only individuals but possibly the whole organisation which might come in danger [sic] if they do
not immediately take the necessary steps.’35

  The reader might wonder whether there was ever any specific discussion with the Norwegians about the codebreaking activities of GC&CS. Nothing has been found to show that there was, or indeed to confirm that there was not. But there are at least oblique references which show that aspects of the subject were being discussed both with them and with the Swedes, with whom there appeared to be some cooperation in the later stages of the war. In November 1944, Cordeaux of SIS wrote to Roscher Lund to inform him that Denham had asked that he should be briefed on a proposal to cut the Narvik cable, which had already been broached before. He continued:

  Apparently the Swedes anticipated that we might reopen the matter and have told Denham that, if we do, we must not take it for granted that they will be able to fulfil their part of the plan, that is the breaking of the German cyphered message passing over the other route. They were very doubtful that they would now be able to do this. They also felt that in fact the Germans would be unlikely to use this other route.

  To put it another way, the Swedes felt that if the plan was now embarked upon the British would accomplish their part, the Swedes would be unable to accomplish theirs, and that the British might then think that the Swedes had rather let them down.36

  There is nothing further to show how this matter was resolved. The SIS officer responsible for Norway, Eric Welsh, often used the codename Theodor or Theodore in correspondence with Norwegian contacts. It is possible that he borrowed this name from someone whom he might have considered to be one of his German opposite numbers. A report from Captain Hugh Trevor-Roper¶¶¶ provided the following information about him: ‘Theodor is the covername of I T/Lw, a section of Abteilung I of the Abwehr, controlled by Oberst Piekenbeck, Chef I, whose object is the collection of technical air force intelligence from enemy and neutral countries (mainly England, the USA and Turkey).’37 Was this a complete coincidence?

  Eric Welsh, the officer in charge of SIS Norwegian operations. © NHM

  Notes

  1 Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper, 1948).

  2 For further detail, see C. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 68–69.

  3 TNA, Rees to Denniston, 15 November 1941, HW 14/22.

  4 Ibid.

  5 See for example, message to Denniston, 11 December 1941, TNA, HW 14/24

  6 TNA, minute to Denniston, 16 January 1942, HW 14/27.

  7 TNA, HW 19/266. Intercepted Norwegian communist messages. There are 250 reports in this file, based on intercepted Abwehr telegrams.

  8 The Venona messages have also been released to the National Archives, and provide some fascinating glimpses of the range of intelligence activities carried out by Soviet MGB and GRU officers in Stockholm in the later stages of the war. The bulk of the messages date from 1944, and they are available in TNA on HW 15/14, HW 15/40, HW 15/41 and HW 15/42.

  9 D. McLachlan, Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action 1939–1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968), p. 406. Also see F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 2 (London: HMSO, 1981), pp. 176–177.

  10 H. Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code (London: Phoenix, 2000), pp. 92–93.

  11 F. H. Hinsley and A. Stripp, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford: OUP, 1993), p. 2.

  12 Hinsley, Vol. 2, p. 174.

  13 Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma, pp. 83–86.

  14 Ibid., pp. 132–136.

  15 Ibid., pp. 167–171.

  16 Sebag-Montefiore, pp. 224–229.

  17 TNA, HW 14/26.

  18 Hinsley, Vol. 4, p. 72.

  19 Different dates are given for the breakthrough in hand cyphers, but this is used by Hinsley, Vol. 2, p. 677. In a footnote in Vol.1, p. 120, he states that it was broken in December 1940, but this must be an error as it had already been widely used by then. TNA, ADM 233/792, containing the first part of the Naval Intelligence Division history, gives the date as 14 April 1940. The GC&CS files are silent on this point.

  20 TNA, ADM 233/792.

  21 A sometimes used variant of this acronym is ‘Intelligence Sections Oliver Strachey’. This is given by Peter Twinn in his chapter on the Abwehr Enigma in Hinsley and Stripp (eds), Codebreakers, p. 123. Twinn worked with Dilly Knox, who later broke the Abwehr machine code. Mavis Batey, who also worked with Knox, in Dilly: The Man Who Broke Enigmas (London: Biteback, 2009) p. 141, puts it the other way around and states that it was officially referred to as Illicit Signals Oliver Strachey. This seems a more likely interpretation. But however the acronym is decrypted, its meaning is perfectly clear.

  22 TNA, generic description of the HW 19 archive for ISOS and ISK, contained in the introduction to the hard copy file series. A similar figure is given in ADM 223/793, German agents’ traffic.

  23 TNA, HW 19/316, notes on the history of ISOS.

  24 Hinsley, Vol. 4, p. 44.

  25 TNA, HW 19/324. No record has been found to show whether Øverby did prove to be identical with Holte.

  26 TNA, HW 19/331. Reports and correspondence of Captain Hugh Trevor-Roper with Strachey.

  27 TNA. ADM 223/792.

  28 Hinsley, Vol. 2, pp. 677–678.

  29 TNA, KV 4/8. History of Camp 020.

  30 Hinsley, op. cit. p. 678.

  31 TNA, ADM 223/792.

  32 TNA, letter from Philby to Vesey, 26 June 1946, KV 3/113.

  33 TNA, HS 7/31.

  34 TNA, HW 19/324.

  35 Correspondence between Liversidge and Roscher Lund, November and December 1944, HFM, FO.II 8.2 E3.1a.

  36 Letter from Cordeaux to Roscher Lund, 27 November 1944, HFM, FO.II 8.2 E5.4.

  37 TNA, HW 19/331.

  * Its greatest achievement was the breaking of Japanese diplomatic codes which gave a remarkable advantage to the American delegation to the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments in 1921–1922, revealing the Japanese fallback position, and thus enabling the Americans to obtain a significant reduction in the number of battleships which Japan would be permitted to build.

  † The key message is a report of 16 February 1945, which states that Sunde had been summoned to Stockholm in accordance with instructions from the centre and that in a conversation with ‘Valentin’ (Fedor Chernov), he confirmed that he and his group had ceased their sabotage work on receipt of their instructions in June 1944.

  ‡ Denham’s codes were vulnerable following the German capture of naval code books in Bergen in 1940. But other German work before that time enabled them to learn virtually everything connected with British operations in and off Norway following their invasion, by reading between 30 and 50 per cent of the naval traffic. They were thus able to estimate accurately the correct dispositions of the British Home Fleet. This was by no means their only achievement. German naval intelligence had some significant success against a variety of British naval codes: for example in the autumn of 1941 they were able to read much of the main Royal Navy cypher, as well as a special cypher which was being used for communications in the Atlantic between Britain, the United States and Canada.

  § I have a personal interest in the acquisition of Enigma equipment and cyphers by ‘pinches’. My father-in-law Peter Meryon, when serving in the Mediterranean in October 1940 as a young sub-lieutenant on Wrestler, led a boarding party onto the Italian submarine Durbo as it was sinking, and grabbed cyphers and cypher tables, as well as recognition signals and details of swept channels into Italian and North African ports. On Wrestler’s return to Gibraltar, he was awarded an immediate DSC.

  ¶ There was a further, unexpected bonus from the Måløy raid in May 1942 when the SOE station Mallard, in the Bergen area, reported that a sack with German documents and codes which had been dropped into the sea during the raid, had later been dredged up by fishermen and was undamaged. SOE quickly replied that they would send a special courier to collect
the consignment, but the file thereafter is silent, so we do not know what happened. (TNA, HS 2/154.)

  || Radio Security Stations were born out of a rather amateur organisation set up in 1928 and run by the War Office to monitor illicit radio transmissions in the UK. After a brief period when these stations were run by the General Post Office and then by the War Office again, they metamorphosed into a much more professional section which was transferred from MI8 to the Security Service. It covered communications of the Abwehr and associated enemy intelligence and security agencies across the whole world. However, it was only able to intercept radio transmissions and could do nothing about telex messages which were sent by land line. This happened in several parts of Europe, but fortunately only rarely in Scandinavia.

  ** For part of the war, the Soviet spy Kim Philby was working in section V of SIS.

  †† Strachey and Knox were two of the very few survivors of the Admiralty’s original codebreaking section in Room 40 during the First World War.

  ‡‡ V-mann was an Abwehr term for one of its agents, short for Vertrauensmann, German for one who could be trusted.

  §§ Royal Victoria Patriotic School, the reception centre where all refugees arriving from occupied Europe were initially interrogated by the security authorities.

  ¶¶ P9 was the designation of Eric Welsh, the head of the SIS section dealing with Norway. Captain John Turner was one of his subordinates.

  |||| There is no evidence that Oxenstierna acted improperly or was in collusion with the Germans. He was an effective attaché who managed to collect more information than the British would have wanted a neutral to obtain. Some of his information was subsequently passed to the Germans in Stockholm. His successor, Prince Bertil, was much less effective and the leak dried up.