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bearing in mind handicap of working from outside your own country’. Carr’s product had been boosted by the re-emergence in May 1942 of his pre-war agent Outcast, who was now working for the Abwehr. Outcast was briefed to report specifically on the results of RAF raids on Berlin and other German cities. His early reports, sent by secret writing to a cover address in Sweden, were not very useful but his stock in London rose dramatically after some detailed and accurate reporting on the results of the Battle of Berlin, the RAF’s heavy bombing campaign launched against the German capital from November 1943, and on which he was debriefed by Carr himself in Stockholm. Carr provided a large-scale plan of Berlin while Outcast ‘produced little scraps of paper concealed all over his person with what seemed to be unintelligible scribbles on them in pencil’. The resulting report reached the Air Ministry before they got any clear photographic intelligence and ‘some weeks later’, recalled Carr, ‘we were delighted to see our typewritten report, almost word for word, in the Air Ministry’s periodic Intelligence Summary, which had been sent to the Air Attache in Stockholm’.

Following his May 1942 visit to Stockholm, Outcast whetted the appetite of his Abwehr employers with the prospect of securing information on the United Kingdom, and possibly even establishing a source there through his good Swedish connections. This scheme eventually developed into a fully fledged double-agent operation. With the help of T. A. ‘Tar’ Robertson of MI5, Outcast passed a mixture of genuine and fictitious information (‘foodstuff’) to the Abwehr, which enhanced his value to them and justified his regular visits to Stockholm. This, in turn, meant that he could be debriefed in person, and it thus improved his reporting. By the end of 1942 he had begun to include information on the power struggle between the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst, a subject of great interest to him as well as to London, since he belonged to a circle of Abwehr officers regarded as close to Admiral Canaris. In early 1943 he was evaluated in Head Office as ‘the best source for information on the German interior produced so far in the war’.

Outcast was known to Swedish Military Intelligence as an Abwehr agent and he supplied them with information on the German-Russian aspects of the war. In turn, he reported to Carr the Swedes’ views on the progress of the war, which were of considerable interest to London, especially when the tide began to turn against the Germans. Late in 1942 Outcast established contact with the Japanese military attaché in Stockholm, General Makoto Onodera, who recruited him as an agent. By 1944 Outcast was providing Onodera with American deception material supplied through SIS. Outcast’s reports continued to be very well received in London throughout 1943. One in particular, on conditions in Poland and Polish attitudes towards the Russians and the Germans, aroused great interest in the Foreign Office and was shown by Menzies to Churchill. When in late 1943 Outcast, ill with tuberculosis, wanted to move with his family from Berlin to Stockholm, SIS was supportive, and he managed it early in 1944. But the Swedes refused to let him stay and he was evacuated to Britain, where he died the following year. In a postwar SIS evaluation he was described as ‘one of the most successful spies against Germany that the 1939-45 war produced’.

Other agents reported from inside Germany, as is illustrated by a telegram from Carr dated 1 October 1943 with a report from a source travelling ‘from Belgium to Stockholm who was in train standing in Hanover Hauptbahnhof during raid September 22nd/September 23rd’. The station remained intact ‘but railway lines about 150 metres outside station (in direction of Berlin) were smashed and five full trains standing on lines were destroyed or badly damaged by bombs and fire’. The district north of the station ‘suffered greatly from bombs and flooding resulting from burst water main pipes. Inhabitants seen escaping from this district wading knee deep