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By Root 2764 0

’. ‘Chip’ and ‘Rance’, a Briton and a German ex-prisoner: ‘Operation launched 10/11 April 44. Contact made with W/T op. but nothing heard since mid-September 44.’ ‘Chip’ was the thirty-five-year-old Philip Frank Chamier, whose father was British and mother German. Having been brought up in Germany, he spoke the language like a native. The Service employed him in 1938-9, when he made several trips to Germany, photographing airfields and gathering ‘useful’ military information. After working as an interrogator of German prisoners-of-war in Egypt, in February 1942 he offered ‘to go to Germany’ for SIS, as he wanted ‘to do something worthwhile before war is over’. ‘I am all for his going,’ minuted one officer at Broadway; ‘mustn’t let slip a chance of getting a man into Germany if he has any potentialities, and can be trusted.’ But it was over two years before Chamier and his German-born radio operator, Friedrich Reschke, were dropped into the Reich. Postwar interrogation of German security officials revealed that shortly after they landed Reschke had betrayed Chamier, who was ‘very brutally treated’ by the Gestapo in a vain effort to get him to work for them as a double agent. There was no certainty about his ultimate fate, though one report asserted that, held in a Berlin prison, he had been killed during an Allied air raid in 1945.2

The third team comprised ‘Hamish’ and ‘Geoffrey’, two Germans: ‘Operation launched from Adriatic 5/6 Sept. 44, but dropped in wrong area and agents were captured by Yugoslav partisans. We await their release. ’ The fourth team (two Germans again), were also dropped in the wrong place, and dramatically so, ‘in Slovakia instead of near Vienna’. One had been picked up by Slovak partisans; of the other there was ‘no news’. Even had the agents survived to report back to London, it is not clear that they could have produced much useful intelligence, beyond humdrum ‘de visu’ (observation) reports of such things as enemy troop movements, the kind of thing which (as demonstrated by Service Clarence in Belgium) only really became useful if supplied in large quantities from a multiplicity of sources. On the other hand, had the Germans been able to dig in and hold their western defence lines, and if the Reich had taken longer to collapse than it actually did, then even low-level tactical information would have been of value to the advancing Allied forces.

In mid-December 1944 a well-placed and experienced German intelligence officer from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA: state security organisation) contacted the newly reopened British embassy in Paris and explained that he had been sent by his superior on a special mission to make contact with the British government, mentioning Churchill and Lord (formerly Sir Robert) Vansittart in particular. When asked to explain, he outlined a vague plan for the many Germans who were against Hitler and the continuance of the war to co-operate with the British in avoiding the destruction of Germany and the dismantling of its industrial base by the Russians, Americans and French. This, he added, could lead only to Germany’s absorption into the Russian sphere of influence, which would surely be unacceptable to the British. He claimed that, although he did not represent an organised resistance movement, his immediate superior had a very wide range of longstanding contacts in the Wehrmacht, heavy industry and the professions. During an initial debriefing, he produced some useful tactical intelligence about German military dispositions and immediate plans, including sabotage in the Dutch-German border region. He identified some German agents in the Netherlands and France; explained that the Germans had had advance knowledge of the Arnhem landings from captured Dutch agents; fingered a Dutch traitor in Queen Wilhelmina’s staff; mentioned a number of operations for infiltrating agents to Ireland by sea; and described plans for a resistance movement within Germany. His mission was believed in Broadway to be ‘apparently part of German plans to disrupt Allied relationships’.