Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [80]
The idea was that captured Abwehr agents should be left in their positions and simply turned by the British – in other words, made to work as ‘double agents’. That way, not only could all German espionage within Britain be monitored but also, the information that these agents sought from the British for their German paymasters would tell MI5 exactly what German intelligence did and did not know about such things as defences and planned manoeuvres.
There was another terrific advantage: the reports that the German agents made, in code, would be followed through the Abwehr networks, helping to break the keys for their particular Enigma cipher.
Such a plan now sounds almost too preposterous to work; and yet it did, handsomely. Captured German agents were given a stark choice: either face a firing squad or obey the orders of an MI5 officer. Once turned, the agents were given information to feed back to their German masters. Most of this was accurate, though inconsequential; some, crucially, was completely false. In other words, these agents were used for strategic deception. As the war went on, one such agent, Wulf Schmidt, known as ‘Harry Tate’, was so spectacularly successful that not only did the British secret service consider him ‘a pearl’, the Germans were even more pleased with him and awarded him the Iron Cross.
As Kim Philby (himself turned down for a job at the Park, as we shall find later) noted in his otherwise not wholly reliable memoirs, the breaking of the Abwehr code also gave Bletchley Park a weird glimpse of ‘the intimate life of German intelligence officers’:
There was the case … of Axel the police dog. He had been posted from Berlin to Algeciras, presumably to guard the Abwehr out-station there from British agents sneaking across the bay from Gibraltar. On the last stage of [the dog’s] journey, Madrid sent a warning telegram to Albert Carbe, alias Cesar, the head of the Abwehr post at Algeciras: ‘Be careful of Axel. He bites.’ Sure enough, a few days later, Algeciras came up with the laconic report: ‘Cesar is in hospital. Axel bit him.’1
But the beginning of 1942 was a time of crisis for the British forces. Although it seemed that the campaign to eject the Germans and Italians from North Africa had been going well in the Western Desert – the capture of Benghazi on Christmas Day had proved a national tonic – General Rommel suddenly turned and struck back with force. The British were back almost where they had begun.
February 1942 brought disaster on another front: the fall of Singapore. General Percival was forced to surrender to the Japanese on 15 February, and to lead a staggering 62,000 men into captivity as prisoners of war. Many of these soldiers were subsequently pushed into slave labour in conditions of horrific brutality, facing systematic beatings and beheadings as well as malnutrition, dehydration and diseases such as beri-beri.
There had been a clutch of cryptographers based in Singapore in the weeks before the surrender, intercepting and decoding messages; among them was Arthur Cooper, brother of Josh. The decoders and Y Service operatives escaped and were evacuated to Colombo in the nick of time. Once again, we see how fragile the Bletchley secret was; if these men had instead been captured and tortured, could they have withstood and refused to say a word?
In addition to the military setbacks, there was, for Bletchley Park, a disaster that the general public knew nothing of at that time – one that threatened to wipe out a large swathe of the codebreaking operation. For a suspicious Admiral Dönitz, concerned that somehow his codes were being read, decreed that from 1 February 1942, the German U-boat command should bring in an updated version of the naval Enigma machine.
From that point on, an extra, fourth rotor was fitted to U-boat Enigma machines. The immediate result was a total U-boat code blackout at Bletchley.