• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2480 0

Armed Forces information’. Much of this resulted from the exploitation of Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Baltic contacts, among businessmen and others who were able to travel between Sweden and German-occupied Europe. One especially valuable Danish agent, a businessman recruited in December 1942 and code-named ‘Elgar’, was a frequent visitor to Stockholm where his company had an office. Other business connections took him to Germany, Finland and Romania, and he acquired information from fellow countrymen working for German heavy industrial companies manufacturing war matériel. During 1943 he recruited some twenty sub-sources, including a diplomat in Hamburg; technical workers in Peenemünde on Usedom island in the Baltic, where the Germans had a weapons-testing site; an employee in the Berlin office of Donau Flugzeugbau, which manufactured Messerschmitt aircraft in Hungary; and a man in the Danish lighthouse service, able to debrief lighthouse-keepers for shipping information.

Conveying material to Cheshire in Sweden required some ingenuity. In the autumn of 1943, for example, Elgar brought three hundred reports on film concealed in glass bottles hidden in one of three barrels of acid imported for business purposes. In November Cordeaux noted that he was ‘among the first’ to report on the V-1 (described at the time as a ‘rocket gun’) and that he had supplied a photograph of a rocket which had landed on the Danish island of Bornholm in the south-western Baltic Sea. He had ‘provided valuable night fighter information, Finnish chemical warfare equipment and valuable reports from his sub-agents and his own journeys in Germany, Finland and Roumania’. One of his sources had provided ‘ground photographs of air raid damage in Hamburg’. But it was too good to last. Elgar was arrested by the Germans in January 1944 and his network disintegrated. Although roughly treated in captivity, he was transferred to a sealed camp in Sweden in April 1945, and was suspected by some of having been an enemy agent. The evidence from surviving accounts of German interrogations of him does not support this in any convincing way, and SIS afterwards decided that he had provided information to his captors simply ‘in order to save his skin’. While he gave the Germans accurate descriptions of SIS staff in Stockholm and of Danish contacts in Sweden and the United Kingdom, he also gave invented information with sufficient plausibility at least to worry the Germans, if not to convince them, claiming, for example, that SIS had ‘succeeded in establishing important groups in Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn, Königsberg and Vienna’ and that English-trained sabotage teams had been deployed in the Danish islands of Zealand, Funen and Falster.

Like all the other neutral capitals in Continental Europe, Stockholm was full of dubious characters offering information to whomever would pay. One such was agent ‘36439’, a Russian émigré who had been a Z Organisation source before the war. In late 1943 this agent claimed to have a penetration source in the Japanese legation, agent ‘Eve’, recruited in June 1943, who provided copies of Japanese despatches and re-enciphering codes; and an economist in Berlin, who, apart from reporting in his own right, retailed gossipy information from an old contact who was a housekeeper in the household of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the head of the German Air Force.

From April 1943 a trained Section V representative, Peter Falk, was posted to Stockholm under Passport Control cover to run a separate Sweden station devoted to attacking the German intelligence service, not only in Sweden but across Scandinavia and elsewhere. Falk’s chief target was Dr Karl-Heinz Krämer, the German assistant air attaché in Stockholm since November 1942. Krämer was a flamboyant character who, as one of SIS’s contacts in the Swedish police complained, ‘always travels in a fast sports car and was therefore very difficult to follow’. He was, in fact, an officer of the Abwehr’s Air Intelligence Section (Luft I) and had been posted to Sweden to develop intelligence operations