The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [323]
The Foreign Office and Anthony Eden (the Foreign Secretary) shared this view and SIS was authorised to debrief him further only on the understanding that the Soviet and United States governments were informed of his arrival, and it was emphasised to them that no attention was being paid to any political suggestions he might make. Frank Foley then questioned him (now given the code-name ‘Dictionary’) in Paris and concluded that he was ‘a character of the highest importance and that provided he is interrogated fully at an early date, his evidence will prove invaluable as it will add enormously to our knowledge of the inner political, military and SD [Sicherheitsdienst] circles in Germany’. On Foley’s recommendation Dictionary was brought to the United Kingdom for further interrogation, and over the next six months became SIS’s most productive human source of the war on German counter-intelligence matters, producing a mass of detailed organisational and historical information (for example, about Venlo), as well as details of personalities, ranging from leading political figures to individual intelligence officers, much of which could naturally be cross-checked by reference to signals intelligence material.
Over the turn of the year 1944-5 Paulson’s unit continued to work steadily on penetrating Germany. Arrangements were made with the help of CSDIC – the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre – to process prisoners-of-war captured by 21st Army Group in Belgium and identify potential recruits for reinfiltration. Lists of possible contacts in twenty-three German cities and towns were prepared. In London, Kenneth Cohen drew up a detailed standard format for monthly progress reports on the number of missions despatched by the unit and their success or failure, the number of recruitments made and reports sent, and so on. A great deal of attention was paid to such operational details as transport, false documentation, civilian clothes and comforts (among other things, P.6 was asked for ‘3 jars of operational rum and 6 small flasks’). A few more agents were parachuted into Germany with wireless sets in late 1944 and early 1945, but produced little or no intelligence, though after the end of hostilities some of the survivors were retasked as agents in Germany. SOE was simultaneously trying to mount similar drops for a deception operation, ‘Periwig’, designed to persuade the Germans that there was an active domestic resistance movement supported by the British. This caused something of a clash of priorities between the two agencies, which SIS won, and various restrictions were put on the SOE effort. But there was also co-operation. SIS allowed two of its agents recruited in North Africa, one French and one Alsatian, to be used for an SOE plan (Operation ‘Longshanks’) aimed at persuading the Germans that Field Marshal von Rundstedt was plotting to overthrow Hitler and was in secret communication with the Allies.
One of the earliest P.6 agents parachuted into Germany was an anti-Nazi Yugoslav who had been recruited by SIS in Uruguay, where he was working in the construction industry. He was brought to the United Kingdom in 1944, trained for undercover work and provided with a false identity as ‘Josef Bauer’, a ‘cement worker’ employed in Germany by the Berlin firm of Siemens-Bauunion. On the night of 2/3 October 1944 he and ‘Brian’, his German-Jewish radio operator, were dropped into south-east Germany, near Heilbronn, from where they had to make their way to Magdeburg, east of Berlin, where Bauer was to be based. His objectives were to report on ‘military and air identifications’, ‘production figures of industrial concerns’, ‘air-raid damage’, ‘morale of the population’ and ‘tendency of the Nazi movement to go underground’. By 11 October the two men had reached Berlin and made contact with an agent of the SIS Stockholm station who smuggled out a secret-writing letter from the agent asking for additional German identity documents and describing Berlin as ‘unbeschreiblich kaput’ (indescribably finished). But he was arrested