The recent launch of The Gingerbread Spy, book 4 in my WW2 series about the German Resistance, took me back into the heart of the subject. In particular, I took another long look at the Allies’ preparations for D-Day and the critical role played by German double agents under the control of MI5.
Operation Overlord
The planned invasion of mainland Europe was called Operation Overlord. The British and their allies amassed troops and equipment in the south of England. It was obvious to the German High Command, the OKW, that an invasion was imminent. The whole of the western border of the Nazi-occupied territories, from northern Norway to the border between France and Spain was fortified.
What the OKW didn’t know for sure was where the initial landings would take place. They knew that the Allies would need a port for the landings, and Calais was the obvious choice; it was closest to the English coastline, and closest to the French border with Germany. The highest concentration of Wehrmacht defensive troops was in this area. Adolf Hitler, who had assumed personal control over the OKW, was convinced that this was where the invasion would start. And British Intelligence ran an elaborate deception operation designed to reinforce this idea.
The Double Cross
By the time the War started in 1939, German military intelligence (the Abwehr) had positioned many agents in England. The final count was over 100 in England (and a few in Ireland). All of these spies were apprehended, some were executed, but most were given – and accepted – the option of working as double agents for British Intelligence, transmitting misinformation from England back to their spymasters in Hamburg and Berlin.
This was what the British called the Double Cross System. It was run by a joint forces committee, the ‘Twenty’ or XX Committee under the chairmanship of John Cecil Masterman. As D-Day approached, the Double Cross agents were kept busy almost exclusively on ‘Operation Fortitude’, the deception operation focused on Operation Overlord.
J C Masterman’s book
Masterman wrote a book called The Double Cross System, first published in the US 1972. My copy was published in 2103 by Vintage, ISBN 978-0-099-57823-9. Masterman describes the system, and marvels at how successful it was. He speculates about how the Abwehr were taken in by the deception. Here’s a telling extract discussing what could happen where an agent makes an obvious error in a transmission:
In the first place the agent reports to a spy-master in the first instance, and the latter in his turn sends on the information to higher authority, often without examining it in close detail. If the error … is one of discrepancy or contradiction, it is highly unlikely that the higher authority will have the detailed knowledge of the case necessary to observe it. It may well be that the actual source of the report will not even be reported, since the spy-master may be anxious to gain prestige for himself and may be running “notional” as well as real agents. If, however, the higher authority does grow suspicious, it is the spy-master who will go to the last extremes, for reasons both of prestige and personal profit, in defence of his agent.
And another. The Germans were just stupid:
In short, it was extremely, almost fantastically, difficult to “blow” a well-established agent. On one occasion an agent was deliberately run in order to show the Germans that he was under [our] control, the object being to give them a false idea of our methods of running such an agent and thus to convince them that the other agents were genuine. The theory was sound and the gaffes committed were crass and blatant, but the object was not achieved, for the simple reason that the Germans continued to think of the agent as being genuine and reliable!
One can picture the members of the XX committee scratching their heads in search of explanations. Here’s what they came up with. The Germans were inefficient:
It must not be forgotten that the Germans were working with uncertain data and acting on information imperfectly understood by us. We might be tempted to think that an Abwehr officer ‘Y’, studying his records must realize that agent ‘X’ was suspect. We were apt to forget all the minor factors which might alter the situation, as, for example, the posting of ‘Y’ to Russia, or the destruction of his records by bombing, or even the inefficiency of himself or his subordinates.
The Black Orchestra
By 1944, when the invasion was in full swing and the Nazis were under siege from the west, the Red Army in the east and in Italy to the south, the German Resistance movement, now dubbed The Black Orchestra by the Gestapo, had recruited a significant number of high-ranking military men.
Admiral Canaris was head of the Abwehr. Canaris was a close friend and confidant of Hitler’s, but he and his deputy, Hans Oster, secretly set about undermining the Nazi regime from the start of the War. German agents were trained in Brandenburg, near Berlin, and Canaris and Oster made sure that the training was so poor that their agents would be easily spotted and neutralized by the British.
German Security Forces
Before the War, the security forces in Germany were fragmented. Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich, made an attempt to unify all of the police and security services when he set up the RSHA in 1939. This brought all police forces (Orpo, Kripo etc.) Gestapo and SD (the SS intelligence agency) under his wing. He attempted to absorb the Abwehr as well, but that organisation remained stubbornly under the umbrella of the armed forces, the Wehrmacht.
By 1942 things had become more fluid. In March, the head of the SD-Ausland, Heinz Jost, was sacked and replaced by Walter Schellenberg, a clever and ambitious protégé of Heydrich’s. By June, Heydrich had been assassinated in Prague, and Oster and Canaris were under suspicion. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was appointed head of the RSHA in 1943, and Schellenberg, who had Himmler’s ear, began to work his way to the top of the security services.
A number of failed attempts to assassinate Hitler culminated in the final July 1944 explosion, and the exposure of the Resistance. At this point, Canaris was arrested and the Abwehr was absorbed into Schellenberg’s SD-Ausland.
A Perfect Partnership
So there you have it. The Abwehr sent poorly trained spies over to England, fully intending that they would be captured and turned by British Intelligence. These double agents were employed to send misinformation back to the Abwehr, and the Abwehr passed this on to the German high command in the full knowledge that what they were passing on was misinformation transmitted from agents under control of MI5.
I wonder if anyone in British Intelligence ever suspected what was going on. Did they really believe that the Abwehr was fooled by the Double Cross system? Might it not have occurred to them that they were pushing against an open door; that the Abwehr was playing to lose? If it had dawned on Masterman or any members of the XX Committee, they would have dismissed the idea as fanciful, and of course, whatever was going on in Berlin, they had to carry on with the deception until well after D-Day and until the War was won.
JJ Toner, June 18, 2018
