The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [301]
The potential for disaster was demonstrated by Dulles’s first contact with the Abwehr representative, Hans Bernd Gisevius, in January 1943, which he reported back to Washington on a cypher which the British ascertained (through their Polish agent Halina Szymańska) had been broken by the Germans. In the middle of April Dulles told Vanden Heuvel that he had seen Gisevius, who had just returned from Berlin and had told him that forty large flying boats had recently been built in Rotterdam to be used for the heavy bombing of London manned by suicide squads. Despite having been alerted to the problem with the cypher, Dulles had reported this to Washington in two telegrams. Dansey thought that Dulles had been ‘stuffed’ by a deliberate piece of German disinformation. Clearly agitated, he told Vanden Heuvel: ‘could you report to the fool [Dulles] who knows his code was compromised if he has used that code to report meetings with anyone, Germans probably identified persons concerned and use them for stuffing. He swallows easily.’
Vanden Heuvel, nevertheless, was keen to exploit Dulles’s contact with Gisevius, who in July 1943 (responding to questions supplied by SIS) told Dulles about rocket projectile tests at ‘Peenemuende or Swinemuende’, for which his source was an Abwehr colleague. Gisevius expressed great concern lest Dulles’s communications were unsafe, since discovery would certainly lead to identification of the original source, and he suggested to Dulles that he should pass the information ‘through British channels for extra safety’ (which he did). The information stated that damage caused by air raids at Friedrichshafen included works producing the steering mechanism for rockets, which could lead to up to three months’ delay in them being put into operation. The main production of rocket bombs was taking place at Frankenthal. The source believed that no other important factories were there other than some sugar refineries and for this reason the source urged that the information must be used with the greatest discretion. The course also stated that Hitler was taking a close personal interest in the production of the projectile.
In September 1943 Szymańska reported that Gisevius, who was ‘highly nervous’, had (for the first time) told her about the ‘V’ (for ‘Vengeance’) weapons being developed. He said he was giving all the details he could ‘as [a] Good German’, because he firmly believed the new weapon was serious and would certainly lengthen the war even if it could not affect the eventual result. Although London remained desperate to glean more information on V-weapons, particularly over rocket sites, scales of production and the date for which firing was planned, Gisevius proved unable to help further. According to Szymańska, by February 1944 Gisevius had become persona non grata among his German colleagues and friends. Dansey told Vanden Heuvel that he feared Gisevius’s usefulness was ‘now quite impaired. 189 [Dulles] has compromised him beyond redemption.’ Dansey was further alarmed since Dulles was ‘flooding’ Washington with Gisevius information, representing it as being from ‘an important source’. When Szymańska saw Gisevius again in February 1944 his position (and that of Canaris) had worsened considerably, particularly after the defection of the Vermehrens in Turkey the previous month. A year later Gisevius told Szymańska that he had been deeply involved in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler and that after its failure he had managed to evade arrest by lying low in Berlin for three months.2
Scandinavia
Cyril Cheshire, head of the Stockholm station from December 1942 until the middle of 1945, expanded and developed the work started by his predecessor, John Martin. Reviewing the station’s output in October 1944, Bill Cordeaux at Head Office noted that Cheshire had worked up the number of reports from fewer than four hundred a month ‘to an average of about 700 per month, the majority of the increase being