Kenneth Benton, The ISOS Years Madrid 1941-3

The ISOS Years: Madrid 1941-3 Author(s): Kenneth Benton Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No.
3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 359-410 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/261155 Accessed: 11/08/2009 11:25
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Kenneth Benton
The ISOSYears:Madrid1941-3
During the period 1941-3, a beginning was made in the process of deceiving the German High Command about our offensive plans. The Bletchley Park cryptographers, B Division of MI5 and Section V (counter-espionage) of MI6 worked hand in hand to use the newly achieved decodes of German radio traffic, known to us as ISOS, to build up a strategic deception plan which effectively wrong-footed the High Command on D-Day. It induced them to believe that the Allied attack would be in the Pas de Calais area, and even after the landings they remained convinced that 'the real attack', by a non-existent 'First United States Army', would follow. For a fortnight after D-Day they kept six divisions in the Pas de Calais.' Our work was done in the utmost secrecy, and the existence of the all-revealing ISOS traffic was kept secure by officers, secretaries and codists for thirty-five years. The morale among the staff employed in what was often boring, repetitious work, was high, perhaps because they knew that whatever disasters might be occurring in North Africa and elsewhere, in their own special field they were winning. Between MI5 and Section V officers there was close and cordial liaison, as required by the interlocking of their work systems. It is true that there was a mole in our midst, but during these years Philby fully supported the project; Soviet interest in defeating the Germans was equal to ours. In the earlier years (1940-1) the main aim was to block German attempts to infiltrate the UK with their spies, but it became clear that as well as keeping the Abwehr case-officers content with their apparent coverage of events in wartime Britain, we could use our turned Abwehr agents for a process of strategic deception. In January 1941 the Twenty Committee was set up to 'exercise a steady and consistent supervision of all double agent work'
Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol. 30 (1995), 359-410.
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during the last four and a half years of the war. It met once a week and held its last meeting in May 1945. It instructed the caseofficers on exactly what information should be sent to Germany by their double agents. Misinformation about the extent of Luftwaffe bombing raids and later of the Vis and V2s, false reports of beaches being prepared for the second front and finally, as stated above, the creation of an imaginary American army and the bases from which it was to be launched, all helped in the grand deception. Our work was an effective contribution to what was being done on a very large scale. The exploitation of ISOS traffic was only one of the many forms of deception adopted by the Allied Command. But the flow of false information from the Twenty Committee had the advantage that its effectiveness could be directly assessed by the reaction of the Abwehr case-officers. For some details in the following pages I have referred to Sir John Masterman's book The Double-Cross System (Yale University Press 1972), a very clear description of the deception process which somehow manages, for security reasons, to avoid any mention of ISOS, on which the whole thing depended. To put my work in Madrid into perspective, I must briefly describe my activities in the preceding three years. Vienna 1937-8 In the mid-1930s, my family became closely acquainted with Marcus von Leitmaier, a senior official in the Austrian Foreign Ministry, and his three daughters, who all came to stay with us in England. It was arranged that I should spend one or two years teaching English at the Theresianum College, a Catholic institution in Vienna, and I took up my post in 1935, when I was twenty-six. It was felt that this would help me considerably in my studies to acquire a General Honours degree in French, German and Italian as an external student of London University. After passing my Finals I expected to take up teaching as a career, either in Austria or the UK. However, in 1937 I met two persons who changed my life completely. My future wife, Peggie Lambert, was working in the Commercial Department of the British Legation, compiling economic reports and acting as secretary to the Commercial Counsellor. She had
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been married at eighteen, divorced at twenty-two and left with two very small boys with whom she spent the next seven years in various parts of Europe, living on an allowance from her motherin-law, who thought more highly of her than of her own son. Two years previously she had had to find work to pay for the boys' education in England, so took the job at the Legation. The other contact was with Captain Thomas Kendrick, the Vienna Passport Control Officer, who had a separate office from those of the Legation and Consulate, and no diplomatic or consular status. It was through Peggie's acquaintance with Kendrick that I met him and was offered the chance of a job as his assistant. I had no idea what this job entailed but accepted very willingly, and in the autumn of 1937 went to London, where I was interviewed by the Director of Passport Control, Maurice Jeffes, and by the socalled Inspector General of Passport Control, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, who had in fact nothing to do with the PCD but was the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The interview with Jeffes was perfunctory, because he knew, as I did not, that I would not be engaged in passport work in Vienna, but intelligence. His office was on the first floor of Broadway Buildings in Westminster, and afterwards I was taken through a door at the back of the building to a flat in a house in Queen Anne's Gate, and to the office of a short, red-faced man, who for some reason wore a bowler-hat while he was interrogating me. The Admiral was a remarkable man. He had been with Beatty at Jutland, and spent some time in an open boat after his battleship was sunk, when he was alleged to have told Beatty that he hated the sea. Owing to the built-in reluctance of the Foreign Office to give any help to the intelligence service, he had to run MI6 on a shoe-string, choosing where possible representatives who were receiving pensions from the armed services - most of them were former Rhine Army officers - and supplementing their salaries with bonuses of ?20 or so at Christmas for good work. The Passport Control cover was useful in two ways: the visa fees augmented the miserly annual sum obtained from the secret fund, and although Passport Control Officers (PCOs) were very rarely granted diplomatic immunity before the War, their offices appeared to have official status, often being inside consulate premises, and there was the rule that they could not operate against the country in which they were stationed. This gave them superficial
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protection and also made possible useful liaisons with local intelligence services. Maurice Jeffes, before his appointment as Director of Passport Control, had been PCO in Paris, and tended to disapprove of PCOs who did no passport control work. This was an attitude from which I had to suffer in subsequent years. Sinclair asked me questions about the languages degree which I had just been awarded, my other education and knowledge of foreign countries, and then said without further ado that on Kendrick's recommendation he would take me on at a salary of ?500 a year, free of tax - this was a concession from the Inland Revenue - but that if he did not feel I was up to it I would be dismissed without any right of appeal. I returned to Vienna and started work at the Passport Control Office as soon as I could leave the Theresianum. I still had no reason to think that my work would be anything but dealing in visas. On my first morning I learned the truth. Captain Kendrick did very little passport control work, which was in the hands of a very efficient examiner. He was fully engaged in intelligence and had as assistants Miss Betty Hodgson and Mrs Margaret (Bill) Holmes. I had previously met both these ladies at the parties the Kendricks quite frequently gave. I had expected to begin dealing with visas, but instead was brought in to one of the back rooms where Bill Holmes passed me a letter addressed to somebody with a Czech name in some street in Vienna and asked me to translate it. I opened the letter, called Bill, and said, 'Look, I can't do this; it is in Czech.' She said, 'Oh, I'm sorry; how stupid; hang on for a moment.' At the back of my desk there was a little open bottle of colourless liquid, with a brush, and she dipped the brush in the liquid, passed it over the whole of the front of the letter and to my amazed eyes red writing appeared at right angles to the Czech text and it was in German. Then she turned the letter over and did the same on the rear side, so that I had two sides of what was in fact a German report. I began to translate - it was obviously from somebody in Czechoslovakia reporting about events in the Sudetenland where the Germans were already planning to take over. After that almost all my work was of this kind. As far as I remember I never had any training in visa work; I was always working with Bill and Betty in the back rooms.
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They had been, I gathered, in the Vienna station for quite a long time and their task was to correspond with agents in various parts of Europe by writing letters to them in secret ink, which of course disappeared, and then turning the letters round and writing crosswise, harmless letters addressed to other, notional, people. The correspondents, as far as I remember, lived in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Italy, particularly the south of Italy and Sicily. The reports I translated were in some cases in Italian, and this was the first time I realized that one reason why I had been recruited was because I spoke Italian and was in fact the only person in the office who did so fluently. But most of the reports were in German. Evidently Kendrick had recruited people who travelled to these different countries and reported back to him by secret ink on what they had seen. The reports that I remember particularly well were those from Augusta in Sicily, giving details of Italian battleships and other vessels in the naval base there. We received quite a number of reports about the Tenth Flotilla MAS (Decima Flotilla MAS), the special naval unit headed by Prince Borghese, which employed the E boats in which our Admiralty was very much interested. They were very fast boats, each with two torpedo tubes, and the idea was that they would penetrate our naval ports like Alexandria and Gibraltar, loose off their torpedoes under cover of night, and escape by sheer speed from the immediate response of our guns and aircraft. At night, of course, they could not have been seen and at that time, I think, our ships had no radar. What we received from Czechoslovakia I cannot remember very well, but we must have had some reports from Germany, because Germany was of tremendous interest to us in 1937 and we all expected that an attack on Austria would follow some time, although we did not know when. On 2 March 1938 Peggie and I were married in the Consulate in Vienna. We had wanted to be married in the Anglican church there but the chaplain was a man we disliked so much that we thought it would really cast a cloud over our marriage if we let him tie us up. So the Consul officiated, with a Union Jack spread over his office table, and the ceremony was witnessed just by our friends in the office. We flew to Venice, had a fortnight's honeymoon, and came back to find, to our amazement, that there were Brown Shirts parading in the streets. Austria had ceased to exist as a separate country. At once everything began to change. Until then we had had the
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Legation, the Consulate and the Passport Control Office. Very soon our Legation was dissolved and all that was left was our office and the Consulate, now created a Consulate General, which gave a certain amount of immunity for consular employees under the Vienna Convention, but not for us. For the time being, life in the office seemed to carry on as usual. The letters were coming in and being translated; we were sending back our reports to London once a fortnight and we moved into the Consulate General building in the Wallnerstrasse for better protection. In the past, obeying the rule, we had never operated against Austria; in fact, there would not have been any intelligence worth getting there. But we certainly must have operated against Germany, and now that Austria had become part of Grossdeutschland we ought not to have been still operating against Germany. I am not sure whether Kendrick did or not. By this time I was helping the examiner with visa work, which had increased substantially, because the Vienna Jews were trying to leave the country. Three months later Kendrick was arrested. He and his wife had left by car to go to England on leave, and were stopped by the Gestapo, somewhere along the route. Kendrick was arrested and his wife escorted back to Vienna where I met her and stayed the night at her house to help her to get in touch with people. The next day a young Vice-Consul, Cecil King, and I went to the Gestapo headquarters in the Hotel Metropole. King made a formal protest about Kendrick's arrest, which was politely rebuffed. Then I asked if he could be released at once. I was told no, so I produced a parcel containing Kendrick's pyjamas and shaving things. It is worth noting that it was the Gestapo who arrested Kendrick, whereas the main German intelligence service abroad at that time was the Abwehr, the German Defence Intelligence Service. But of course the charge against Kendrick was that he had been operating against Germany, in which case it was a question for the Gestapo. He was held for forty-eight hours and given a bad time, but not tortured. I think it very unlikely that he disclosed any information. But what is certainly true is that he was told a great deal about what they knew of his work, and of our work in general, throughout Europe. I saw him when he was released and he was a badly shaken man. We discussed what had to be done and I accompanied him and his wife to the airport for their flight to England.
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I was now in charge, because as soon as Kendrick was arrested, the visa examiner, and the two women who did all the secret work, were packed off to London and I took over the visa office. In the meantime, of course, I had burned everything secret. As we had no official protection, I was afraid that the Gestapo might just come in and search the whole office, so everything that could be burned was destroyed. But I was now faced with the task of running the Visa Section, which was a very big job indeed. It had grown considerably ever since the Anschluss. The examiner had been working extremely hard and had been given some secretaries to help in examining visa applicants. Mostly it was a question of Jewish people. The Jews in Vienna, who were being atrociously treated by the nazis, were desperately trying to get out to go to Palestine or anywhere else. Now, at this time - 1938 - Britain still counted in its Empire India, the Caribbean islands, most of middle Africa, the British Concessions in China and very many parts of the Far East including, of course, Hong Kong and Singapore. For all these places we could give visas and the Jews were desperate to know how to get them. Some were able to go to Palestine, particularly if they had enough money to get what was called a capitalist visa. If they had ?1,000, which they could transfer to Israel by irrevocable deed of gift, we could give them a visa. But many of them never had a chance. They were rounded up by the Germans and, although this was before the real Holocaust began, they were packed off in trains to unknown destinations. We saw the most dreadful scenes. I have never worked as hard as I did then. In the end I managed to get fifteen helpers as examiners, who dealt with the applications all day long. Every morning I used to give a talk to a crowd that filled the courtyard of the Consulate building. I had to tell them that if they had a relative in Canada they had a chance; but that they must do this and this. If they wanted to go to India, there was no hope at all unless they were doctors or dentists, when they might be allowed visas, and so on. I gave these lectures every morning and then throughout the day supervised the stamping of visas when there were any to give or told weeping people that there was no chance for them. It was a very bad period. All intelligence had, of course, stopped the moment that Kendrick was arrested. It was just plain visa work, and in the end it was decided to send out another man to take charge. This was
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George Berry, an experienced visa officer from Riga in Latvia, who took over and ran the office very efficiently. Riga 1938-40 I was called in to the Consul General's office one day at the end of August, and he showed me a telegram from London saying that Peggie and I were to be transferred at once to Riga in Latvia. I did not know what had happened until much later, when I found that one of Kendrick's agents had been arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated. He was now due to come up for trial. Head Office was afraid that, although in fact I had never had anything to do with him - he was run entirely by Kendrick - I might be subpoenaed to appear as a witness. The Germans would then make a great display of showing what they knew about the work of Passport Control Officers, and our office in particular. This would be very bad publicity. Moreover, I might be sent to prison, because at the time in question, as already stated, I still had no diplomatic or consular immunity at all, although I was now working inside the Consulate General. So it was decided that I should go to Riga as Berry's replacement and would be given the rank of Honorary Acting Vice-Consul. It does not sound very much, but actually it meant that I had some diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention. We packed quickly, leaving friends in the Consulate General to arrange for our furniture and heavy gear to be forwarded to Riga, and took a plane to Prague and then on to Warsaw, where the PCO, Colonel Shelley, entertained us. Next day we flew in an ancient Junkers aircraft to land first in Kaunas and then in Riga, where winter was already beginning to be felt. The PCO, Captain Leslie Nicholson, was welcoming, and I settled in quite quickly. Peggie was now unemployed, but she had much to do finding a pleasant flat and furnishing it with our things which, surprisingly, followed us quite shortly after we arrived. She was also busy writing her diary of what had happened to us in Vienna and beginning to record first impressions of life in Latvia. Her account of what happened to us in the next two years is in her book Baltic Countdown (Centaur Press 1984), and I will only summarize it briefly in the following pages. The first year was very pleasant. We had the boys out in the
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summer; we had a boat on the Lielupe river; we made very good friends and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. In September 1939 war broke out and I had a summons from my territorial unit, the Honourable Artillery Company, ordering me to report at once and join up, but I was not allowed to, because at that time nobody in the Foreign Service was released for military duties, so I stayed. We only had two intelligence sources. One was a Latvian and the other was not an agent but a liaison with the head of the Latvian Military Intelligence Service, which was useful. So we sent in these reports, but most of my time was spent in visa work, of which there was a great deal, because there was already tension among the Jewish community. In late 1939 came the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which, in effect, divided up Eastern Europe into the spheres of influence of the Russians and the Germans. The Germans were to have Poland and the Russians the Baltic States. We did not know this; but everyone knew that the Pact had been signed. And the fact that the Germans, the rabid anti-communists, had signed a defensive pact with the Russians was a sinister enough development. The Jews in Latvia were most anxious to get out. Among them were many who had been in Palestine as immigrants and had gone back to Riga to their relatives. Now all they wanted was to go back to Palestine. As time went on it became clear that Hitler's intentions were different from what had been expected. The Jews had been sure that the Germans would annex Latvia, but what happened was that the German Baltic families, including some of our own friends, had to leave for Germany as immigrants. It became obvious that at some time or other the Russians would annex the three Baltic states, which they did, of course, in June 1940. The story of the Soviet invasion is in Peggie's book, together with our rather adventurous journey home after our delegation had been wound up and all the papers had been burned all over again - we were quite used to burning quantities of secret documents by this time. Our return to England was rather late, due to our attempt to help the remaining British nationals to find some destination to which they could go, and we left a month after consular immunity had been withdrawn. Many British subjects finally got visas to go through Russia to the Black Sea and then Constantinople and
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others were sent to Australia, some of whom got stuck there for the rest of the war. We finally set off on 1 September 1940 and went by rail to Moscow and Vladivostok, then by sea to Japan, and from Yokohama to Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal and then back to England. We had travelled 23,000 miles. Bletchley Park 1940-1 We crossed the Atlantic out of convoy in the Duchess of Richmond and arrived in Liverpool at night with the docks ablaze. Next morning we were able to get a train, which took us, not to London, because the station had been bombed, but to where we could take a bus and arrive at Broadway Buildings. Everyone was a little surprised that we had arrived so quickly; although in fact it had taken us two months, and we were given a few days' leave and went down to Erdisley, where the boys' school had been transferred, and visited my mother-in-law, and my father and family. We then returned to London and reported for duty. We were told that our first job was to explain why, although our Latvian agent had come on the air three times, his messages were indecipherable, so we were taken by car to Bletchley Park where the code section had been evacuated. Before we had left Riga we had trained our Latvian agent as a stay-behind agent and wireless operator; Peggie was involved in much of this, including the use of a special code which we made up ourselves, using two identical dictionaries and two copies of the Riga telephone directory. We had sent copies of the dictionary and directory to Head Office while we still had the use of a King's Messenger. The code was quite simple. Each word in the message was looked up in the German section of the dictionary and the page and line numbers used to form a five-figure group. When the coded message was complete in the form of lines of five-figure groups, it was reciphered by using groups formed by selecting numbers taken from the telephone directory. Thus, 'Your message 8', that is, Ihre Sendung acht evolves like this: dictionary page 29, line 4, is Ihre; dictionary page 56, line 13, is Sendung; dictionary page 2, line 7 is acht. The basic message therefore begins: 02904 05613 00207. In the Riga telephone directory the selected page is 49 and the selected line on the page is 84. The telephone number on page 49, line 84 is 47825. The first group of the reciphered message, ready for
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transmission is therefore 02904 plus 47825, without carrying, equals 49729. To decode, subtract the reciphering group 47825 from the first group 49729 and you get the original group 02904 = Ihre. To find where to start copying numbers from the directory, the very first group in the transmitted message might read 04984, which indicated the page and line numbers in the directory. After this indicator group the reciphered message would begin 49729, as shown above. Unless anyone knew that the directories were being used for deciphering, the method was unbreakable. Peggie taught our agent how to transmit in Morse by using a special device supplied by our Technical Aids Section in Broadway, which dispensed with the conventional Morse-tapper. A metal panel was used, with channels containing series of electrical contacts, each of which corresponded to a digit from 0 to 9. By means of a contact being slid along the selected channel, the correct series of dots and dashes was supplied to the transmitter. Our agent was an intelligent man, as well as a very brave one, and he mastered the system quite quickly under Peggie's tuition. How he concealed the transmitter and Morse panel we never learned. It was a risk he accepted. Colonel Maltby, the chief assistant to Brigadier Gambier-Parry, head of the radio staff at Whaddon Chase and Hanslope, had come out to Riga shortly before the Legation was closed down, and he and I tested the small transmitter we were going to supply to the agent. We chose part of the forest on the Riga Strand and set up the set at nightfall. It took him some time to get what he called a thumping clear signal from his operators at Hanslope, and a Morse message which acknowledged his signal, but he did it. As already stated, our agent later showed his competence by actually sending the three messages with the help of his little transmitter and codes. At Bletchley Park we were sent to see the Head of Codes who told us that his codists could not understand the messages, so there must be something wrong with the codes. I asked to see the decrypts; and at once saw that the messages were perfectly good, but that they were in German. (Our agent never spoke anything else but German to us.) They were not very helpful; there was a certain amount of information about Russian activities, but that was it. There were no more messages from our agent and we concluded that the Soviet police or NKVD had traced his signals and located him. If so, that might well have been the end of a
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good man and a Latvian patriot. I tend to think so, but to the cynically-minded there is another explanation. He might understandably have seen little future in his highly dangerous contact with us and have reported to the Soviet authorities as soon as we had left the country, and the NKVD (as it then was) had rejected the tempting idea of using the link with MI6 for supplying us with false information, and simply taken over the man, his codes and radio set for whatever use they could find. In Bletchley Park there was first of all our main code section, with a large staff of codists, which dealt with communications between Head Office and stations all over the world. Secondly, there was the special code section which dealt with our most secret material, ISOS, which I shall be discussing later. Thirdly, there was the headquarters of GC and CS (now GCHQ), the cryptographers. Nearby at Whaddon Chase, was the headquarters of Brigadier Gambier-Parry, who was in charge of the Service's wireless communications. The transmitters and receivers were at Hanslope Park. While we were there the Head of Codes asked to see me. This was Captain Hastings, a very colourful naval officer, who said he liked the cut of my jib, and what would I say to being his assistant? He did not tell me at the time, but I learnt afterwards, that what he really wanted was someone to take over from him while he went hunting, because he was a member of two of the local hunts, which were still operative during the war. This seemed to me the best thing on offer, so I agreed. I was taken on as Assistant Head of Codes and Peggie became assistant to the head codist. We found lodgings in a farmhouse, where we were well looked after. The boys came and joined us for the holidays. We were summoned to visit Head Office in Broadway Buildings to be interrogated by Naval Section about what we had seen in Vladivostok. We had been there for a week, and had had an opportunity to view the whole of the naval harbour from a hill above the town and make a careful note of all the ships we could see. So we were interrogated about this, and on a number of other things including how the Russians had behaved, what regiments we had seen, and so on. We had of course made notes of all the regimental numbers we could see on the epaulettes of officers and men in the Riga streets. While we still had codes, we had sent messages back to London giving all the accounts we could of the Russian invasion forces.
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I started work, and one of my jobs was to see every telegram that came into or went out of Headquarters (which would have been quite impossible for one man to do later on). I found this extremely informative and interesting, especially the intelligence telegrams to and from our stations throughout the world, and messages and instructions about the work of the new SOE (Special Operations Executive), which had been invented by Churchill and Dalton and had cover in the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Its objective, at first, was to cause havoc among the nazis by spreading black propaganda. Later on, of course, it did a good deal of active sabotage work, but at this stage it was still elementary (and, as it seemed to me, rather ridiculous). I am talking here about November 1940 and most of the SOE messages I read began: 'Spread the following whispers', and then gave a number of false rumours which were supposed to cause alarm and despondency among the German population, such as stating that sausages made at suchand-such a place contained human flesh. But there was one telegram that struck me as extremely interesting. In fact, it was to affect the whole of my career. It had been sent to the Head of Station in Madrid and asked for his view on the appointment of a Section V officer to fill the vacant post of PCO in Madrid. I knew that officers with experience of Passport Control work were very few in number, and that therefore I might have a chance of landing the job, whatever it proved to be. At that time I had no idea of what Section V was about. Head Office in Broadway comprised sections designated by Roman numerals and covering political, air force, naval, military, economic, scientific and administration requirements. There was also Section V, which was for counter-espionage. There had been very few telegrams from or to Section V among those which had passed across my desk, because the Section was still at the development stage and part of its correspondence was in a special code. Before the war began, and for one or two years afterwards, there had in fact been little counter-espionage activity to occupy the Section. Although, especially after two MI6 officers were hijacked in Holland in September 1939 and comprehensively interrogated, the Germans had a good knowledge of MI6, our acquaintance with the German intelligence networks was very limited indeed. But two important things had happened. One was the appointment of Colonel Felix Cowgill to be Deputy Head of Section V,
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under Colonel Valentine Vivian. Cowgill was an extremely experienced counter-espionage officer, having served in India for many years and being the author of two important books on the subject. He set about calling the Chief's attention to the importance of catching German spies. But the identification and apprehension of spies in the UK was the task of MI5. What Cowgill wanted was to identify spies before they came to this country and pass the names and details to MI5 for action. His first objective was to assemble all information about the German intelligence services and how they operated abroad. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or German Security Headquarters, embraced the Gestapo (including the secret police), the civil police and the Abwehr. This last title means defence, but was used for the German Defence Intelligence Service, headed by Admiral Canaris and at the time in question spread through sections (Aste or Stellen) located in Berlin (the headquarters), major German towns and places in France and other occupied territory. Only the Abwehr, not the Gestapo, was allowed to operate abroad. When I had read the Section V telegram, I went to see Hastings. He had said when he took me on that on no account was I to get another job, so I had to take my courage in both hands and say that this job looked particularly suitable. I said that I spoke Italian very well and thought I could learn Spanish, that I had had intelligence experience abroad and so on. He said I could go and see Colonel Cowgill. I took Peggie with me and we went by the shuttle from Bletchley Park to St Albans, where we were dropped at one of the two villas which Section V had requisitioned for its offices. I knew that if I got the job Cowgill would also want to see my wife. He sat in a room with paper piled everywhere and made me welcome. He had checked with Head Office on my previous career and seemed to approve. Before he began to question me I was 'indoctrinated'. I had, of course, already signed the Official Secrets Act form, but this was special; I had to swear a binding oath that I would never reveal to anyone at any time, and this meant for ever, the existence of a most secret source known as ISOS, without proper authorization. I swore. Then Cowgill explained that ISOS was the result of decoding the secret radio communications between the German Defence Intelligence Service (Abwehr), and its branches and outposts, including those in German missions abroad. He said that the Germans had no idea that their secret method of encoding and
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decoding messages could have been broken, as was obvious from the prolific way they used it. By reading their traffic, which we called ISOS, we were learning almost everything about their Service and its agents, the instructions issued to them and their reports, with the comments of the case-officers. He said it was of inestimable value to our Defence Staff to read the questionnaires on all subjects which the agents were expected to satisfy. Cowgill's lined face broke into an unusual smile. 'We almost know what they've had for breakfast.' Then he went on to explain that the Abwehr was recruiting and training agents for penetrating the United Kingdom and the Americas, and sending them to their destinations through Spain and Portugal, mainly, while for a few special cases they could organize flights through Switzerland and Scandinavia. But much information about the agents might be sent by bag or special courier, in which event we were 'blind'. This was especially the case with names, which were usually sent by separate means, and photographs. If I were selected for the job in Spain, it would be my task to fill in the gaps in the ISOS information. By this time it was fairly clear to me that I had been selected already, so they must have been rather short of candidates. This made me hope that the weak point in my qualifications, Spanish, might be treated leniently. It was. Cowgill asked me whether I spoke Spanish. I said I had an honours degree in Italian and felt sure that I could acquire Spanish without difficulty. (This was a gross exaggeration.) What I think had helped him to choose me was my knowledge of Passport Control work and agent-running, and that I knew how our stations were administered. Also that I spoke German. This last point interested him at once, and he asked his secretary to find some ISOS decodes, still in German. It was fascinating for me to read an original German message from Ast Hamburg to Abwehr Madrid about a newly-recruited agent. He was an unnamed Irishman, who had been in gaol in occupied France until the Abwehr released him and recruited him as a penetration agent. I was told that I would be PCO in Madrid, with one examiner and a clerk for visa work and one secretary, indoctrinated in ISOS, to help with my work for Section V, which would mainly consist of identifying the German spies as they passed through Spain and signalling their arrival date in their target countries. I pointed out that my wife had the same qualifications as I for this work, being
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fluent in German and Italian and having had experience of agentrunning. I told him about our 'stay-behind' agent. He said that he would like to meet her, as he had no other candidate in mind. He recruited Peggie that afternoon. At a second meeting with Cowgill, I asked him if the station head in Madrid knew about my work, and he said that he did not and would not be told about ISOS. In fact, the only person in the Embassy to be indoctrinated, besides Peggie and myself, would be the Ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare. Cowgill agreed with me that Hamilton-Stokes, the station head, would be unlikely to want a subordinate who could not discuss his work with him, but he said Basil Fenwick, responsible for the Iberian area, would not agree to my having separate status, and I would have to sort out the problem on the spot. With misgivings, I had to accept; the prospect of the job was too attractive to quarrel about personal status. Or so I thought. We later spent several days in St Albans, met the officers who would be dealing with our information, and learned a great deal about how the Section worked and was organized. There was obviously a very close link with MI5, and it was explained to me how a Section V case-officer, dealing with the impending arrival in the UK of a German agent, would be in constant touch with the MI5 officer who would take charge of him on arrival. The object was not only to stop an enemy agent from operating, but where possible to 'turn' him. He could be given the simple choice of either being tried and shot as a spy or agreeing to work entirely under the orders of the MI5 case-officer. When a spy was successfully turned, the profit was twofold. On the one hand, the Abwehr case-officer in Hamburg or in one of the Stellen in Lyon, Angers, etc., would believe that he had a useful agent on his books, and thus have less need to recruit others. On the other, the false information which the British caseofficer would send to Germany through his agent's form of communication (e.g. radio messages or secret ink letters) could be useful for strategic deception. But in both cases it was essential that the information sent to the Germans should appear to be genuine. MI5 had already realized, from the study of ISOS traffic between Abwehr case-officers and their headquarters, that some of their agents in the UK were fudging their reports, and these agents were being rounded up and either turned or held for trial.
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But fudging would always be spotted in the end, and what was needed was to supply information so convincing that the Abwehr chiefs would believe that they were already adequately served by the UK agents. Hence the need for the Double-Cross System, so ably described by Sir John Masterman in his book of that name, which explained how the Twenty Committee, of which he was chairman, met every week to determine precisely what information could be given to the Abwehr through their false agents. The first task was for the turned agent to report back to his Abwehr case-officer in Hamburg or Paris that he had arrived safely and found accommodation, but in his secret ink or radio messages he would emphasize his difficulties in settling in, his failure perhaps to find the money which had been cached for him, and so on. There would often be bickering between him and his German case-officer, but the latter would strain every nerve to make things easy for his protege. Then the agent would send in his first report, probably of little value, which would be tactfully criticized. As time went on, he would proudly announce that he had found a sub-agent, give full details of him and demand money. Later, he would send reports containing real, and often, from the German point of view, valuable information, but this would have been given the seal of approval by the Twenty Committee. Many of the vicissitudes of life as a foreigner in wartime London, with its bombs, rations and blackouts would be described by the agent, who was perhaps safely ensconced in a house in the country eating military rations and far from danger, except when his German case-officer would send him to assess the bomb damage in the docks area or Coventry. MI5 men like 'Tar' Robertson, who ran Tricycle or Tomas (sic) Harris, the half-Spanish officer who developed the GARBO network, were brilliant, imaginative men. At the end of the war GARBO had fourteen registered 'agents' and eleven official 'contacts', all notional. He was awarded the Iron Cross, and the citation, found in captured Abwehr records, included the words: 'The difficulties in maintaining and extending the (GARBO) network have been increasing recently, but were mastered by (GARBO) with an utter disregard for all personal interests and by giving all he was capable of. (GARBO) has himself been hiding for weeks, separated from his wife and family.' GARBO, a Spaniard, was run by Abwehr Madrid, and they continued to
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believe in him until the end of the war. He was given the MBE by the British government. This briefing from Section V and MI5 colleagues about the running of double agents in the UK was invaluable to me when I began work in Marid, because, in assessing a man's potential as a double agent, it was essential to know how he would be handled in the UK. Shortly afterwards Peggie and I left by flying boat for Lisbon. We were given a very warm welcome by Ralph Jarvis, the Section V representative. Jarvis was theoretically on the staff of the MI6 Head of Station, but his offices were completely separate and, although his boss knew nothing of what he was doing, they seemed to get on well enough, and this gave me hope, against my better judgement, that my position in Madrid might be similar. Jarvis was also PCO and thus had two staffs; only some of his intelligence staff were indoctrinated in ISOS, but they had a good deal to do, since Lisbon was a very active take-off point for German agents. Part of his work which interested me very much was his use of ISOS material to identify German agents working in Lisbon and try to discover their sources of information. It had soon become clear that some of the Abwehr agents reporting on Portuguese affairs were fabricating their reports. One of them spent most of his time on the beach and found all his information from published documents and reference books. One of Jarvis's assistants had found me a very good secondhand car, a Buick alleged to have previously belonged to L6on Blum's secretary, who had arrived in Lisbon as a refugee. We had been warned that in Madrid both food and drink were scarce, since the city was still suffering from the effects of the Civil War. So we bought what we thought we would need and started off on the long trip over the mountains to Spain. We had formed a very good opinion of the Portuguese, who even in 1941, when they had every reason to expect us to lose the war, displayed Union Jacks in many shop windows, for to the Portuguese the 'oldest ally' label still meant something. I had been warned against the dangers of bandits in the mountains and given an automatic and a bulb filled with strong ammonia, but the only Spaniards we met on the trip were friendly, even if they often looked starved.
Benton: The ISOS Years The Beginnings: Madrid 1941
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We arrived at the Ritz in Madrid. I had stowed the gun and the bulb into my pockets when the porter took the car to the garage. It was unfortunate that the ancient lift was crowded. Bodies were pressed together, and the bulb blew its stopper. By the time we reached our floor, the people with us were gasping for breath, but we had to pretend to be as mystified as they were. The following morning I went to see Sir Samuel Hoare. I knew little about him, except that he had been a great skater, a Cabinet Minister, First Lord of the Admiralty and the co-author of the dicey Hoare-Laval Pact. When I was ushered into his study, he was sitting behind a huge desk at the end of the long room, and there was only one paper on it, probably a letter from the FO about my appointment. He stood up, moved round to two armchairs which faced each other in front of the desk and made me sit down. I thought at the time that it was a carefully staged gesture to put a new addition to his staff at his ease, but in fact he always greeted me in this way. In later years, when I had a position of some responsibility at Headquarters, I sometimes greeted new acquaintances in the same way. But I never managed to present a clean desk, as Sir Samuel did. I have always felt grateful to him for his handling of this first interview. He showed much interest in the ISOS traffic but did not ask how I hoped to use it. The only warning he gave me was not to 'fall foul of the Spaniards'. I must record that during the whole of my time in Madrid, the Ambassador always supported me when I needed him, with the exception of one contretemps which I shall mention shortly. Hamilton-Stokes, the Head of the Madrid SIS Station, was an awkward man but an experienced intelligence officer, who had been in various other posts. He had quite a decent-sized staff, but he was very much frustrated by the fact that the Ambassador had put limits on what he could do. 'He must not fall foul of the Spaniards', just what had been said to me. This meant that he had only a few agents and did not really produce a great deal. Now he found himself landed with a young subordinate who was dealing with matters that he, Hamilton-Stokes, was not allowed to know about. He objected, very naturally. The whole situation came to a head about a month after I arrived. I received a telegram from London which instructed me
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to go to Gibraltar at once because of ISOS information about a German agent who had arrived there, and I was to liaise with my opposite number. I came back to Madrid and was summoned to see the Ambassador, who said that Hamilton-Stokes had told him that I had gone to Gibraltar without his authority. Was this so? I said I was afraid it was but I had had instructions from London and could not do anything about it. He asked if I had told Hamilton-Stokes where I was going. I said yes; he had not liked it, but I had said that the trip was on instructions from London. The Ambassador said that he could not have the intelligence staff a divided house, and that I would have to leave for home within forty-eight hours. I went back to my office, which was separate from Hamilton-Stokes's and in a different street, and encoded a message to Cowgill marked 'Most Immediate. Decipher Yourself', (the way to get rapid action). Both Peggie and I felt rather shattered. The Ambassadress, Lady Maude Hoare, had arranged a party that evening for the whole staff, including locally-employed people, and I said that it would be tactless for us to attend. But Peggie said she would not miss the occasion for worlds, so we took our staff and turned up at the Residence on time. Lady Maude, who perhaps felt that she must not show off in front of 'other ranks', wore a rather dismal-looking knitted dress, which she had decided to liven up a little by wearing her splendid necklace of large, natural pearls. She greeted Peggie as the latest arrival among the diplomatic wives and took her to meet Sir Samuel. The poor man was embarrassed, because he could obviously not wish Peggie a pleasant tour in Madrid when he had just sacked her and her husband, but Peggie grasped at a very tenuous link with the Hoare family as a conversational gambit. 'My Nanny', she said boldly, 'used to be a close friend of a colleague who looked after the children of Admiral Hall, your godchildren. She used to see you in the nursery, Sir, when you visited them.' He seized the subject very willingly. 'Of course I remember Nanny Lambert', he said genially, and they spoke about the two nannies until Peggie could make her escape. A telegram from the Permanent Under-Secretary (i.e. the Head) of the FO came back the next day, addressed personally to the Ambassador, who summoned me. He did not show me the telegram, and it was only twenty years later that I learned what the PUS had telegraphed. The gist was that Mr Churchill wished to inform the Ambassador that the work I was to do was of consider-
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able value to the war effort. Sir Samuel told me that he gathered that my work was of great importance, and that although he had not so far had any chance of seeing it, he accepted that I must have liberty to get on with it. But he said he would only agree to my staying in Madrid if my official posting was separated from Hamilton-Stokes's. This was agreed, and I received a telegram from Fenwick appointing me head of a separate station, to be known as Iberia. I broke the news to the Head of Station, who exploded. 'Doesn't that fool Fenwick realize that Iberia means the whole peninsula? Are you supposed to be in charge of Jarvis as well?' Of course this was not what Fenwick had meant, and I tried to calm Hamilton-Stokes down. We remained on outwardly friendly terms, but I did not expect any help from him in my work. We set up the visa side of the office, with a small room for me to use on the few occasions when I would have to deal with visa applicants, and bought an ancient Ratner safe for our ISOS material. After a spell in hotels, we found a pleasant flat off the Castellana, with a garage for the Buick, and exchanged courtesy visits with members of the diplomatic staff. Then we set to work. Madrid was still suffering from the effects of the Civil War. People in the streets looked cowed and half-starved. Those who had been on the wrong side could not get jobs, and many were shot every morning at dawn. A Falange mob stoned the Embassy windows and our cars, while the Germans took photographs. On some days the temperature rose to 95 degrees, and there was no air-conditioning in our apartment-block. But we were young and healthy, and the rations sent from Gibraltar were a great help. We worked early and late, and tried to sleep for two hours through the midday heat. I soon realized that we had to have a clear idea of which Abwehr stations (Stellen) were involved in sending agents through Spain, and the St Albans staff were able to give me a copy of their chart, including the names of the main officers concerned. This was most useful, because sometimes messages referred to named officers rather than their stations. The German stations were to a great extent independent of each other. They corresponded with Berlin, described what they were doing and sent in their agents' reports, but they had freedom to recruit agents as they liked, train them, equip them and send them off to Spain. And later, if all went well, they would act as case-officers to run their agents in the UK and exploit their contacts.
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We soon had a good example of the sort of problem we would have to solve. A letter came from Head Office with information from an ISOS intercept, a radio message sent from Ast Hamburg to Abwehr Madrid, giving details of a new agent, being trained and equipped for his spying mission in England. He was a former member of the British Union of Fascists who had been in danger of arrest and had fled, early in the war, to Germany, hoping to get work in anti-British propaganda. The Abwehr recruiters had spotted him and persuaded him to try spying instead. His photograph and name would follow by courier. According to the Hamburg station, he had shown promise and was almost ready for despatch to Spain en route for England. He had been given codes training and shown how to construct a radio transmitter, and would be equipped with secret ink and developer, his radio crystal, a book for use in transposition coding and a secret ink document containing his main directives and a list of British fascist contacts whom he might be able to contact. It had been decided that it would be too risky to let him use his British passport, even with false personal details and photograph, and he had been given a 'false-false' passport2 with a real but altered photograph and a new name. Details of his flight to Madrid would follow in about ten days' time. It was requested that he be met on arrival, and found accommodation for two days, during which his personal hiding-places for his ink, instructions, radio-frequency crystal and currency should be checked and a seat booked on the first available flight from Lisbon to England. Hamburg had added, 'This is a potentially valuable source. Grateful for thorough checking and encouragement.' Reading this letter I was at a loss to know what we could do. Even when we got the flight details we would have no one who could check on arrivals from Hamburg - or would the flight be Hamburg-Berlin (or Paris?)-Madrid? - nor any informant who could help with customers checking into hotels or, later, embarking on a train or air journey to Lisbon. And his passport photograph had been 'altered'. Perhaps he now had a beard. Analysing the problem and the means of solving it, we came to this conclusion: 1. An Abwehr station signals the departure of a new agent. We learn a lot about him from the ISOS intercept but we do not have his name or sight of a photograph.
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2. At a guess, the two days' stay in Madrid requested in the Hamburg message may have had a good reason and be requested in all cases. The Abwehr case-officers would be well aware that once their protege had left occupied territory and was free to go where he wished, he might well decide that the dangerous life of a spy was not for him, and either inform us (which happened often), or try to remain in Spain or another neutral country. Therefore, an opportunity for checking his state of mind, encouraging him and making sure that he had a clear idea of his instructions and had hidden his more secret equipment according to Abwehr rules would be advisable. In fact, this is what usually happened; there was a stop of a few days in Madrid. 3. He would arrive in Madrid either by air direct, or by air to Barcelona and on by train, and leave for Lisbon by sleeper-train or flight, probably not by car. 4. He would be accommodated in a hotel in Madrid and possibly also in Barcelona. In order to identify the spy we should need: for 3 above, passenger lists of flights to Madrid and Barcelona by relevant airlines, but probably Lufthansa; passenger lists for the trains, the only available being sleeper and reserved first class passenger lists; air passenger lists for the Lisbon-Poole flights; for 4 above, we should try to get at the reception desks of the main hotels. It was a tall order, but well within two years we had achieved all these requirements. We were immensely helped by the fact that the Abwehr officers were a gentlemanly organization. They believed in treating their spies well, accommodated them at good hotels and sent them on by sleeper or first class reserved seats. This meant that we could limit our enquiries, but must make a start. The ISOS traffic which we received from St Albans either by bag or coded telegram grew and grew. I soon found that I needed more staff and this was very difficult to arrange because the Spaniards were becoming increasingly alarmed at the growing size of both the British and German embassies; and they had imposed a ban. No more staff from the UK were allowed. This meant that I had to try to find other people. In the end I engaged the help of some members of the British community. Their work consisted very largely of checking names. Ultimately, we had a row of sixteen card cabinets and a large
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part of the day was taken up by five women, working side by side, who simply checked whether a new name was already on the cards; if so, an addition had to be recorded. If not, a fresh name card was made out. I had no idea about filing and our first extremely primitive method was to file every paper which came into the office, and copies of those that went out, in chronological order, in large leverlock files. On the cards there would be just the name and details of the person concerned, and the numbers of the papers on the files. This in the end drove the officer who succeeded me frantic, and he changed the whole system, but while it lasted, it worked out really remarkably well. It was at first only Peggie and I who could encode and decode, but later on I was given an assistant, Jack Ivens, who also had a secretary. Jack had been a businessman with Spanish connections, and spoke much better Spanish than I did. He proved an invaluable aid and made it possible for Peggie and me to take leave in the UK and attend a course. I had a good visa examiner and she had her own secretary, but they, of course, had nothing to do with my Section V work. I felt that I must make better contact in the embassy among the different departments, and here I should explain a little about the Madrid Embassy, because it was remarkable. Although Sir Samuel Hoare was very anxious not to fall foul of the Spaniards, as he had said, in fact he had on his staff not just one or two intelligence service officers but several, who were in competition with each other for his favour. The Military Attache, Brigadier Torr, had his own 'special source' who would produce information which bypassed Head of Chancery and went straight to the Ambassador. The Naval Attache, Alan Hillgarth, had a whole series of 'sources' whose information, again, was only to be passed to the Ambassador. The Economic Counsellor had some and also the Blacklist Section, which had a great deal of information about Spanish firms which were dealing with the nazis. There were all these different sources of 'intelligence' as well as my staff and Hamilton-Stokes's. It was a big embassy and people in almost all departments were from time to time very useful to me. The other great help that I had was from the twenty-two Consular posts, distributed right around the coast and also in the interior, and I think it is fair to say that there was not one of them that was not helpful in providing me with information. The most important for me were the
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Consulate General in Barcelona, the Consulate in Bilbao and the Vice-Consulates in Santander and San Sebastian, but there were many other contacts, even in the very small Vice-Consulates in Jerez, Granada and Cartagena, who were useful at one time or another. They all helped to fill the cards in our enormous index. The card index, in the course of nearly three years when I was in charge, grew to fourteen feet in length and really appeared to have a life of its own, because it often produced information that we did not know it had. Into that card index went the names of visa applicants, lists of ship passengers, names of known agents, Abwehr officers, guests at hotels, passengers on air flights, passengers on trains, as well as individuals about whom we had received information from Head Office or locally. Through friends in the Consulate General in Barcelona and in other places, we recruited head agents who in turn could hire informants to obtain lists of passengers on the Lufthansa flights, lists of persons staying at certain hotels and sleeper and first class 'reserved' passengers between Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and Lisbon. We were able to obtain flight passenger lists through an agent in the airport. Then we found that in Barcelona the Abwehr almost always used the Hotel Palace and all we had to discover was the list of people arriving there on the date in question. Sometimes we had the bill for the whole exercise and, knowing how much it cost to put people up at the Hotel Palace in Barcelona, we could check that this in fact was the hotel chosen, and look at the guest list. Sometimes it was then obvious, owing to the size of the sum of money quoted, that the man was going to be sent on to Bilbao, on his way to spy in the USA. He would embark on one of the two great Spanish liners that crossed the Atlantic, the Cabo de Hornos and the Cabo de Buena Esperanza. When, by comparing the flight passenger list, the hotel list and the train list, we found that there was one name that appeared on all three, on the right dates, we knew for certain that this was the agent we were trying to spot. Through the active collaboration of the Consulate in Bilbao, we could obtain a copy of the passenger list of either ship, so that we could identify the one on which the agent was embarking, and even his cabin number. This was of tremendous importance because there was no question of contacting the man, and perhaps trying to turn him, in Spain. We were tempted sometimes, when we knew for certain who an agent was, to telephone him at his hotel in Barcelona and tell him we knew
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perfectly well that he was a German spy, and that if he wished to avoid very serious trouble he should tell his German control nothing but come and see us at the Passport Control Office when he was passing through Madrid. But that would have been too risky. What if the man decided to say, 'No, I am damned if I'm going to do this to my German control; he's treated me very well. I'm going to tell him at once that I am blown to the British, that this is the offer I've had from them, and that we must cancel the whole project.' That would have made the Germans wonder how we could have known so much. They would have begun to suspect that we were decoding their telegrams, and the fat would have been in the fire. What we could depend on was our limited control of the seas. The Spaniards had had to agree that their two transatlantic liners, on their way to the United States, must call at Bermuda for checking. The passengers were interviewed and any German nationals were taken off. This gave us a wonderful opportunity when we knew that an agent was on this boat and his cabin number. We alerted the Bermuda police through St Albans. When the liner reached Bermuda, while the passenger himself was being interviewed, his cabin would be searched by the police with a finetooth comb. And they were experts. The Abwehr trainers could have taught nothing to the Bermuda police about hiding-places on a steamship. The covers of lifeboats, lavatory cisterns, berth cushions and sophisticated caches like the double linings of suitcases were all old hat to them. Somewhere the spy was bound to have hidden his instructions, his secret ink and its developer, his brief, some form of reciphering pad that he could use with codes, and finally, of course, his wireless transmitter, or, if he had not yet got one, the vital crystal which would determine the wavelength on which he was to operate. Sometimes the instructions were in secret ink and the ink itself and its developer were hidden in some piece of toiletry, like a tin of talcum powder. But in many cases the Abwehr used microphotography (which the Germans had developed, very cleverly). There were two forms of micro-photographic reduction. It could be to the size of a postage stamp, which was stuck onto an envelope and covered with a real stamp. We did not know this until one 'walk-in' agent in Madrid picked an envelope from his pocket, with a cancelled stamp on it, and told us that underneath it were his instructions. We got a kettle and steamed it off and there, true
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enough, in tiny lettering, were the man's detailed instructions about what he had to do when he got to England, and other notes about coding, the use of secret inks and so on. We got used to this device and the people at Bermuda knew that there was always a chance, if an envelope had stamps on it, of finding hidden messages. So they would put it under a UV lamp or find some other way of seeing if there was a message underneath. But then the Germans had an even more clever method, and this was to reduce the message much smaller. They had found a way in which a sheet of instructions as big as A4 size could be photographed and then reduced and reduced until it was the size of a pinhead. These were extremely easy to conceal. One agent whom I interviewed in Madrid showed me that his case-officer's instructions and notes were always in the full stop which followed the date in a letter. He had several completely harmless-looking letters dealing with insurance or his family, and the full stops after the dates were in fact the micro-dots. To read them he would need a powerful microscope. We found an agent who was sent off by one of the rather more naive Abwehr officers and actually carried a very large microscope in his luggage on the way to England, but I expect that the usual method was for the agent to borrow a microscope, transcribe what the micro-dot contained, and return the microscope to the shop. The first time I saw a micro-dot was on an Irish 'walk-in', again a case of someone who had been caught up by the war and who had boasted how he hated the British, and was recruited by the Abwehr, trained for six months and prepared for his mission in England. As soon as he arrived in Madrid, he turned up in my office, pulled out his tie, turned it inside out, pointed to a bit of wax stuck on the back and said, 'Those are my instructions. That's my micro-dot.' On the Cabo de Buena Esperanza we recruited a steward who had a hiding-place above his bar. Part of the ceiling slid back to reveal a big space. He used to be contacted by German agents when they boarded the ship and they gave him their wireless sets to hide there so that they got through the control. If an agent was discovered at Bermuda and was hoping to go on to the States, he would be taken off the ship, interrogated, and then handed over in due course to the Americans. Sometimes the journey was broken at Bermuda and the passengers went on to
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Caribbean countries or Mexico, but most of them went on to the United States. The agents we used, in airports, railway stations, sleeping-cars, hotels and the Spanish liners were not easy to come by. A great deal of the credit should go to the British subjects in the Embassy and Consular posts who went to great lengths to help us. They did not know about ISOS, but they accepted that we had sources who provided sometimes remarkably accurate information. A clerk in the Bilbao Consulate, who had lived in the area for many years, was on friendly terms with someone in the shipping office who could supply passenger lists. The excuse could be that a journalist friend wanted to know if a certain person was travelling on the ship. Money might change hands, but Spaniards would do a great deal for a friendly evening with the cards and a certain amount of drink. 'Lloyds' was another excuse. 'It's needed for the Shipping List people.' And so on. Jack Ivens and I recruited many informants ourselves but, usually, to start with, on behalf of a national London newspaper, or Lloyds List or a jealous wife, or even Interpol. Once a contact had shown willingness to be helpful, one could proceed in a more open manner and finally raise the question of a reward. With British subjects it was much easier. Many of those who were working in Spain during the war had a guilty feeling about being safe and well-fed when their relatives were suffering hardship in Britain, and we could openly tell them that we were working for intelligence. In most cases they did not shy away and were often eager to do something to help. But still, of course, no mention of ISOS. When we began work in Madrid, we assumed that both the Spanish and the Germans would be watching us constantly, and every time I went out to make a contact I drove fast and with several turnings for the first mile or so until I could be certain that I was not being followed. It was not difficult, because there were not so many cars on the Spanish roads in those days. When, as occasionally happened, people actually approached Embassy staff and offered specialist information which they thought would help our war effort, we had to be very cautious about accepting their help, because we were always afraid, in the early days, that either the Spanish Secret Police or the Germans might be trying to trap us into a situation which could be exploited. It was only later that we learned from ISOS material and from the enquiries of another of our agents, that neither the Germans
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nor the Spaniards were actively spying on our activities. If the Abwehr had designs on us there would certainly have been mention in their correspondence with Berlin, and there was none. Nevertheless, during the first year I never contacted a new source where we could be observed or overheard, and always bore in mind that my informant, however genuine-seeming, might be a double-crosser. Sometimes we were given very little information, owing to gaps in ISOS traffic or corruption in transmission, and there was one case that earned from Philby a laconic comment 'Good arithmetic!'. The first we had heard of Abwehr agent DANTE was a request from Abwehr Madrid to their Hamburg colleagues for a large sum in pesetas 'for DANTE's rail fare' to be credited to their account. The sum was far too large for the journey from Madrid to either Bilbao or Lisbon, so we guessed that Madrid had sent Hamburg a rail ticket for DANTE's travel from Barcelona to Madrid. But it could have been by day, with a reserved first class seat, or by sleeper. The onward journey to Bilbao or Lisbon would probably have been by sleeper. If the tickets had been bought by the German Embassy there would have been a diplomatic discount of 10 per cent and another 5 per cent if the journey was midweek. There were therefore a dozen ways in which the sum could have been reached. We worked them out and one sum was exactly right. DANTE had travelled by day to Madrid and on by sleeper to Lisbon, where he was identified. Ralph Jarvis was getting hotel lists and those of the Englandbound flying boats and had surveillance teams to check on the contacts of known agents during their stay in Lisbon, so together we were getting near total coverage of Abwehr agents transiting the Peninsula en route to Britain and the USA. There was one case which has become rather famous, and is mentioned in various books, but it was of no real importance as far as the war was concerned. The Spanish Press Attache in London, Angel Alcazar de Velasco, was known to be an agent of the Germans and the Japanese. Abwehr Madrid was forwarding reports from his British sources to Berlin. But when he returned to Madrid on long leave this correspondence still continued, and we could not work out who his agents in England were or how they transmitted reports to Madrid. I was asked to try to find out what was happening. We had by this time a number of people who could keep a
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watch on suspects, and we soon found that Alcazar had a clerk who hated him and when the worse for drink would bitterly complain of his bad treatment. He also hinted that he knew things that would cause great trouble to Alcazar if he revealed them. It took a little time to develop a contact with the clerk, but I was then able to get to him directly. He was told I was British and this made him quite eager to meet me. He smelled money. I made an appointment and told him that Alcazar was playing a dangerous game. He was spying for the Germans, and if the Spanish Secret Police discovered this - and it would be easy for me to warn them - Alcazar, and by association anyone in his employ, would be in serious trouble. Whether or not he believed this rather unlikely story, the clerk looked frightened, and I asked him if he had the keys to Alcazar's safe. He said no, but he would have the keys when Alcazar went on a fortnight's holiday to Mallorca the following week. I told him he could earn a lot of money by allowing us to borrow the contents of the safe for a few days. They would be returned in exactly the same order as before. There was a good deal of bickering, but in the end he offered to do what we wanted for ?2,000. This seemed to me a ridiculous sum, since I had never paid more than about ?100 for information, but I reported the offer to St Albans - and was told to accept it. By this time, Kim Philby had been put in charge of the Iberian desk in Section V and was therefore my boss. Some time afterwards I asked him why on earth he had agreed to the payment of such an extravagant sum for what might have proved worthless. (In these days the amount would be equal to at least ?50,000.) He said that Finance Department had raised their hands in horror at the idea, but he had pointed out that a single broadside from a battleship would have cost more, and they had to agree. (It was, of course, a false comparison; the Admiralty's budget was infinitely greater than ours.) I let the clerk know that he would be paid what the loot was worth, but that the sum he had mentioned was not impossible, and he agreed. On the night in question I met him outside Madrid. As always, I was afraid that the man might be a stooge for the Spanish Secret Police, and waited until he had walked some distance from his car before I would speak to him. I showed him that I had an automatic in my hand, and when we were both sitting in my Buick I still kept the gun visible. I was reassured, however, by the abject state
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of fright the clerk was suffering. He handed over a large suitcase and I gave him ?1,000 in sterling notes, saying he would have the rest if it proved worthwhile. He blustered, but I was not going to give him any more. He was a horrible little man. And, in fact, when I met him again four days later, I handed back the suitcase, with the papers and account books in the same order as before, but no more money, saying that he had been lucky to get what he had received for such worthless stuff. He was very unpleasant, but too scared to linger. All he wanted to do was get the papers back in the safe and stash the money. What I had told him was quite true. We had copied all the papers and accounts and it was quite clear that Alcazar had made no payments to agents and that his sources were British and American technical magazines. Cuttings from some magazines were actually pinned to copies of the reports sent to the Abwehr and the Japanese. Unwanted Tasks Relations between Hamilton-Stokes and Basil Fenwick became very bad indeed, to the point that Hamilton-Stokes wrote a fierce letter to the Chief, complaining about Fenwick's mishandling of his job. But he remained. My only dealings with him were about leave and allowances, and in these matters he was reasonable enough. One result of this lack of co-operation was that he began to ask me to do things he thought Hamilton-Stokes would cavil at. The first task was a singularly useless exercise. We were told that there was a danger that Hitler would decide to invade and occupy Spain. It was therefore necessary for us to recruit staybehind agents who would be able to report by radio on developments such as Spanish resistance, and so forth. We were not asked, for the time being, to find suitable stay-behind men, but only to cache six of the specially-made transmitter-receivers. These Mark 1 sets were hefty things, because they had accumulators in them and were about the size of a small fat suitcase, and very heavy, and the whole idea was that they should be hidden in places where they could not possibly be found except by the person who was informed of their exact whereabouts. I consulted a friend who was the manager of a British firm. We stashed one, I remember, on a Sunday in a remote warehouse where there was
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a washbasin in a concrete sink. We brought bricks and mortar, enclosed the front of the sink with a new wall and put the set inside. Anybody who would need to use it would have to break through the brick wall. That was one set. Another went somewhere in the garden of one of the small Vice-Consulates. Another was hidden in a shed in a forest where there was a great deal of wood strewn about and we thought we would get away with it by digging a hole under a pile of wood and lining it with rubber sheeting. The shed itself was not used at all, so there was a good chance that the set would escape detection. What we did not know, and only learned later, was that the whole idea was useless, because if you leave one of these accumulator sets for more than a month or so, the water which is chemically formed inside will rust up everything, and in fact within six months all those six sets would have been utterly useless for any purpose at all. The next job was also to expose bad planning. Fenwick wrote to say that SOE needed clothing of Spanish origin for agents to be dropped into the south of France. As I recall, he put it: 'We should like you to procure eleven suits, accompanying shirts and underclothing, and boots, all of Spanish manufacture, suitable for the man in a small way. Measurements are in the accompanying envelope.' I discussed this requirement with one of our Madrid agents, a British businessman. He asked what was meant by 'the man in a small way' and I said I supposed a clerk or skilled workman, likely to have clothes made from second-class material. He said he knew a cheap tailor who could be paid to keep his mouth shut. Two days later we met in a bar. My informant said, 'Those measurements can't be right.' 'Why?' 'He asked me if the clothes were for a circus and he was grinning like a Cheshire cat. He said that if they were for people they would have to be very short, with 46-inch chests and arms that reached down to their knees.' 'Tell him to stop working, for God's sake. I'll get the measurements checked.' Fenwick apologized and sent new measurements by radio, and the clothes were made.
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But my agent was worried. 'If my man tells his drinking pals he's been asked by the British for spare clothing suitable for gorillas the story could spread. So I've told him they are clothes for anti-Franco prisoners who have escaped. He's rabidly against the government so I think he'll stay mum.' But it was worrying. A slip like this, in a matter which had nothing to do with my Section V mission, could land us all in trouble.
I have a rather vague memory of having been asked, probably late in 1941, by Section V, for the telephone number of my flat, on the grounds that it might be necessary for an escaping agent when passing through Madrid. A double agent, CELERY, formerly an RAF officer, notionally cashiered for malpractice, was working with the famous agent SNOW, Arthur George Owens, known to the Abwehr as Johnny. SNOW had been active for M15 since before the war as a double agent in touch with Major Ritter, alias Dr Rantzau, a Luftwaffe officer on the staff of Abwehr Hamburg. Ritter was having doubts about SNOW's genuineness as an Abwehr spy, and SNOW, on his case-officer's orders, aimed to clear his name by providing Ritter with a valuable new source, CELERY, whom he introduced to him in Lisbon as John Brown. Although Ritter was still very doubtful about SNOW, he was so impressed by the perfectly genuine information which CELERY gave him at this first meeting that he asked him to stay as his guest in Hamburg for a few weeks so that he could be debriefed at length. CELERY, as instructed by his case-officer, agreed. During his time in Hamburg he was followed everywhere and his possessions secretly searched, but no evidence was found that he was not what he said he was, a potential spy for the Abwehr. So far this story seems to be accurate; what follows comes from Ladislas Farrago's book, The Game of the Foxes, and appears by his account to come from his conversations after the war with Major Ritter. On the last night of his stay in Hamburg there was a goodbye dinner, during which Ritter's wife noticed that CELERY carried a signet ring which had a hinged lid, and alerted her husband. CELERY was drinking heavily and Ritter took him on to another tavern and filled him up first with brandy and then with a Mickey
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Finn. CELERY passed out, his ring was seized and taken to the Hamburg Abwehr, where it was found that behind the lid was a tiny photograph of a girl, on the back of which, in secret ink, were some numbers, apparently in code, and an address in a Spanish town (i.e. 38 Calle Velasquez). According to Farrago, the ring was returned to the sleeping CELERY, who was allowed to leave Hamburg next day. This seems to me extremely unlikely; if CELERY had any secret message on him it was surely reason for a full interrogation. But Farrago goes on to write that the Abwehr experts could not understand the secret writing code. In fact, they gave the address and telephone number of my house in Madrid. CELERY was escorted in the Lisbon plane, but at a stop-over in Madrid he went into a lavatory and was not seen again. It was later concluded that he had slipped out, telephoned me and been met and smuggled out to Gibraltar without delay. I have no recollection that this happened. Ritter might have had access to Farrago's captured Abwehr documents and have known my name and address, and just invented their inclusion in the signet ring and the story about CELERY's escape. Incidentally, a hinged signet ring is the last place to hide anything, because it is such an obvious cache. There is one good reason for my scepticism. At the time in question we were still living in hotels, not in a house, and I therefore had no private telephone. One rather odd requirement was due to the mention in ISOS material of Abwehr contacts in various parts of Spain, who were referred to by name. We could not understand what their function was, but it may have been in connection with some plan, perhaps still at the drafting stage, for the Wehrmacht to invade Spain. We tried to trace the agents' names through our regional contacts, but found no evidence of any activity worth reporting. We felt the need for a surveillance team in Madrid, and especially for making sure that 'walk-in' agents did not double-cross us. We were still wondering how we could cope with this requirement when we had a windfall. Through a contact in the Embassy who had to deal with escaped French soldiers and airmen, we learned of a gang of six criminals from Marseilles who, on the run from
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the French police, had seized a car and crossed into Spain - so they told us later - by giving the Hitler salute and charging through the controls. In any case, here they were, in Madrid, and apparently looking for outlets for their various skills. They also said that they wished to go to England and join de Gaulle's Free French units. They were told that they would have to speak to my office about the question of visas, and their leader, a man we nicknamed SHIFTY, was interviewed by Peggie. She suggested that he and his men would do well to show their enthusiasm for the Allied cause by doing some work in Madrid for the British Embassy. They would be paid. During the winter of 1940/1, before we came to Madrid, we had attended a short course in personal security and surveillance, and Peggie and I decided to train SHIFTY and his men as a surveillance team. They accepted our offer with alacrity and underwent instruction from Peggie very happily. They formed an affection for my wife because she knew Marseilles well, having lived for a year at Sanary shortly after her divorce, and she understood their horrible Marseillaise patois. The team was used quite frequently for checking the movements of 'walk-ins' and others, and also as a back-up if we had to interview someone who might be a cover for a hijack operation. There was only one occasion when they slipped up, and disastrously. It must have been in the summer of 1943, when some were beginning to see how the war might end, that a member of the German Embassy (not an Abwehr officer) put out a tentative feeler for a contact with our Press Section, who passed him on to me. I arranged a meeting at night near a farmhouse a few miles from Madrid and told Head Office as a matter of routine. To my surprise, for by this time we were not much afraid of hijacking, they insisted that we should have the meeting under observation by SHIFTY's gang. We deployed the men well before the time for the meeting and the German's car arrived on time. He was alone and obviously very nervous. I had begun to question him when one of SHIFTY's men, who thought he had been placed in the wrong position, suddenly leapt to his feet and galloped across the scene, passing close by me and the astounded German, who screamed in terror and ran for his car. We heard no more from him. Peggie scolded SHIFTY, but her admonitions were nothing to what the wretched thug got from SHIFTY.
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I think SHIFTY's gang succeeded in getting to England and did join the Free French, but I have no knowledge of what happened next.
Walk-Ins Of the nineteen spies whom we identified during my time in Madrid about a third were walk-ins, that is, people who came to the Embassy to offer their services. Of the cases that follow, one was a German who volunteered to work for the Allies but had never been a spy. The others were either Abwehr officers or, in TREASURE's case, an Abwehr spy, like all the other walk-ins. For most of my time in Madrid I had the services of an excellent agent, a German Jew. He was an educated man, liberal-minded, and he hated the nazis, so he made an approach to Tom Burns, the Press Attache, who informed me. I made an appointment to meet him on a lonely stretch of road in the country, where I could be sure he was not followed. He said he wanted to help our cause and could offer us a source inside the DGS (Direccion General de Seguridad), the organization which included the Spanish police, special troops and secret police. The source could keep me informed of any threats to our security from the Spaniards. This was a mouth-watering opportunity, but obviously exactly the sort of thing which would come under the Ambassador's ban. However, Sir Samuel made no objection when I pointed out how useful such a contact might be to the Embassy in general. We came to terms about pay and future meetings, which were always outside Madrid. The main value of reports from this source was negative, in the sense that he discovered that no attempt was being made by the DGS to keep track of our activities, both mine and those of the other sections of the Embassy. Our German agent remained a very useful source for the station for many years to come. But I am afraid that in the days of my successors he was allowed to enter the office for meetings. Some time after the end of the war, the Spanish source was arrested and our agent was on the run. The Head of Station got him into a safe house and had him taken to Gibraltar by car, passing through the Spanish controls with a temporary British passport. By some official misunderstanding the temporary passport was exchanged in Gibraltar for a real one, and he was enabled to enter
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the UK and seek employment like any British national. For many years he was looked after by officers of the Service, who finally found him a lucrative job as world salesman for a Midlands firm. He travelled all over the five continents and made a lot of money. My wife and I saw him frequently until his death a few years ago in Marbella, to where he had retired. ARTIST proved to be an exceptionally valuable source. His recruitment took place in February 1943, I think, and was initiated by a summons to me from the Ambassador to go at once to one of the upstairs rooms in the Embassy, where a man would be waiting for me under guard. I could talk to him in German. The room was one of those occasionally used as a bedroom for escaped prisoners of war, and a Chancery messenger was there, in charge of a small man who was chain-smoking and looking rather sweaty and apprehensive. I greeted him in German and we shook hands. The messenger left us. He told me he was an officer in the Abwehr Service, and wished us to protect him from the Gestapo. I asked which Abwehr division and he said, rather proudly, that he was a Forscher. This was very interesting indeed, because the Forscher (explorers) were members of the Abwehr who were free to travel throughout Europe looking for suitable people to be recruited and trained as spies. I rang the bell and asked the messenger, who was on the watch nearby, to bring us whisky. My guest suddenly smiled rather charmingly. 'Where I come from we love whisky', he said, 'and I could certainly do with a drink right now.' 'You're in trouble?' 'The Gestapo are on my tail because I made a report on their dealings in forged British bank notes', he said. 'Have they followed you here?' 'No. I shook them off.' He told me later that he had gone through the routine Abwehr security training, and knew all about surveillance and its avoidance. 'May I have your name?' He gave it and we gave him the cover name of ARTIST. 'I suppose you are Mr Benton', he said casually - and I jumped. He explained that he had frequent discussions with the Abwehr officers in Madrid and had learned what they knew about my staff It was not very much, but they did know about Kendrick's arrest
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in Vienna and that I had been his assistant. I asked what they thought we were doing. He said he had asked Kiihlenthal, the head of the Abwehr counter-intelligence section, that very question, and he had smiled in a fatherly way, and said, 'Benton and Ivens are sly foxes' ('sie sind schlaue Fachse'), but added that it was Miss Gillott who ran the whole office (sie schmeisst die ganze Bude). This was reassuring, because although Molly Gillott was my very efficient visa examiner, she dealt only with the visa traffic and had no connection with Section V work. In later conversations with ARTIST it became clear that, at least as far as he could make out, the Germans knew nothing about our secret activities. At that first meeting, ARTIST told me the identities of the chief Abwehr officers in the German Embassy and their special fields of interest. They all appeared to control agents in the UK, the USA or South America, but he was very sceptical about their achievements. He told me that he had been present at a meeting in Madrid when Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr Service, on a routine visit, made each section head stand up and list the agents he had under control. ARTIST said he watched the Admiral's face while the statements were being made and was convinced that he believed very little of what he was hearing. (Obviously, I did not reveal that through ISOS we knew most of what he was telling me.) 'I'm sure some of them have been turned', he added, 'and I know one Abwehr agent, a man I recruited myself, who has either been turned already or would go over to your side at the drop of a hat.' 'Who is that?' 'I'm giving you a lot of information, aren't I? Well, it'll be up to you to help me in return.' 'Anything I can do. Who is this agent?' 'He's Dusan Popov, a Jugoslav. He's a prolific agent, run from both Belgrade and Lisbon. He has twice been to England for his Abwehr controller and has just had instructions to travel to America. They've worked out a good cover story for him. He's a rich businessman, and he's supposed to be seeing contacts in the countries he visits to discuss some research he has been doing in Belgrade.' At that first meeting we talked for a couple of hours, and then he wanted to go, leaving by the tradesmen's entrance. I told him that he would be staying the night in our Embassy, and he rather
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ruefully agreed. 'It's in your interest', I explained. 'If the Gestapo are after you - and you must tell me that story tomorrow - they may not have ruled out the chance that you've come here. By tomorrow I'll have a safe house.' It was very late that night before Peggie and I got to bed, after encoding an account of the interview. By ten o'clock the next morning a 'Most Immediate' message from St Albans was being decoded. It said, 'ARTIST is telling you the truth. He is a Forscher, and well-known to us. Popov is one of our most successful double agents, pseudonym TRICYCLE. This contact has great potential value. Use utmost caution, but try to obtain names of other agents he has recruited, in case there is one we have missed.' I cannot remember how I found a safe house for ARTIST, but think it was through a member of the Embassy staff who had a key to the flat of a Spanish friend who was on holiday. We used SHIFTY's gang to watch the flat and make sure that no other persons were interested in it. We also used the French to make sure that the tradesmen's door was not under surveillance when we let ARTIST out of the Embassy the following day and escorted him to the safe house, where I had another debriefing session with him. The Gestapo-forged money story was never very satisfactorily unravelled. We knew, of course, that there was a Gestapo section in the German Embassy. The man in charge was named Winzer, and his head of security lived in the flat below ours. They both had CD number-plates on their cars. Their job would be the physical security of the Embassy and Residence and a watching brief in respect of Embassy staff and local German, Austrian, Czech and French citizens. But if any Abwehr officer were suspected of criminal actions, it would also be for the Gestapo to investigate. ARTIST had told me that he suspected the Gestapo of lining their pockets with forged British bank notes, but I was never quite sure that it was not the other way round. If so, he ran a lot of risks, not least because he had a great liking for pornographic films and admitted that one of the reasons why he came so frequently to Madrid was the existence of two clandestine Madrid cinemas which specialized in this kind of film. He called them affectionately cines cochon. After one or two weeks my responsibility was lifted, because Cowgill decided that it would be better to have ARTIST's further debriefing done in Lisbon, where there was much less danger of
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Gestapo surveillance and where the Portuguese Secret Police were comparatively friendly. I was very sorry to have to part with ARTIST, because he was an interesting and well-educated man and very good company. He was, moreover, able to relieve Peggie's anxiety about the safety of our two boys in England. One of the most interesting, if only partially revealing stories ARTIST told us was that Hitler had prepared a secret weapon of immense potency which would spread terror throughout the whole of the south of England. It would have been already in operation, he explained, but for the fact that the RAF (acting, as I learned later, on decrypted German defence messages) had bombed Peennemtinde and set back the whole programme. ARTIST did not know any details about the mystery weapon, which was of course the V.1, but said he thought the programme would start in April. (It was actually June.) Peggie asked whether the boys' school in Herefordshire would be in the target area, and he said definitely not. He understood the target zone would be the Thames valley and areas south. This knowledge was a great relief to us. Before he left for Lisbon, ARTIST referred back to what he had told me about TRICYCLE. 'He is due to go to England again', he remarked. 'I said I thought he was ready to defect, but for Heaven's sake don't allow your friends to approach him in any way that might make my colleagues suspicious. It would be better if they appeared to treat him during the whole of his stay in Britain as a slightly suspicious alien. He must seem to act always as a German spy cleverly concealing his mission.' I did not tell him that if I had forwarded his warning to Section V and MI5 it would have been like teaching my grandmother to suck eggs. He was welcomed, secretly, in Lisbon as a valued friend and his debriefing was continued by Charles de Salis, who had succeeded Ralph Jarvis as Section V head in Lisbon. ARTIST stayed for some months in Lisbon and was very thoroughly interrogated, to our profit.3He had told us, with a visible shudder, that the Gestapo had a trained hijack team, skilled in entering foreign countries, seizing a wanted man and smuggling him back across the frontiers without arousing suspicion. When ARTIST was on his way to an Abwehr assignment in Oporto, the Gestapo Ablege-Kommando caught up with him and smuggled him back to Germany for interrogation. He died, probably shot, some time later.
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A rather attractive woman of about thirty came to the PCO one morning in the summer of 1943 and told the examiner, Molly Gillott, that she had to see me urgently, so after I had gone from the ISOS side of the office to my room in the PCO she was shown in. She came to the point at once, saying she was an Abwehr agent, recruited and trained by Major Kliemann, of I. Luft, the airforce section of Abwehr Paris, for work in England, where she was to operate with secret ink and a transmitter-receiver, sending her reports to Paris. She said she was the daughter of a Tsarist general who was active in the anti-Soviet movement. Kliemann had at first made her acquaintance as a potential spy for work in Paris, but she had persuaded him that she would be more use in England, where she had friends and spoke the language fluently. She said Kliemann was 'an old fool' and easy for her to manipulate, and from what I saw of her during her stay in Madrid I can well believe this. She was first and foremost a self-server and had notable persuasive powers. Although she had been fully trained in Paris at the Abwehr spy schools, the plans for her journey to the UK, and her activities once there, had been very sketchily dealt with. She knew how to use a transceiver but Kliemann had neglected to provide her with one or the means of getting it to the UK. In fact, his best suggestion was that she should hide it in a portable gramophone! She knew that was a ridiculously dangerous idea, but had the gramophone with her in the hotel where Abwehr Madrid had lodged her through a go-between. Her visit to my office had been made quite openly, since, as the holder of a League of Nations 'stateless passport', she had to obtain a visa from us in any case. I told her to say to her Abwehr contact that we had telegraphed to London for approval of the visa, and this in fact we did - made a visa application to the PCD with a back-up telegram to St Albans. TREASURE, as we named her, had been placed in the care of a junior Abwehr officer, who was meeting her from time to time in a safe house - we were glad to have its address for record purposes! - in order to check her knowledge of her mission, deal with her requests for money (which I imagine were frequent) and arrange her onward journey. She told him that her visa application would take at least a fortnight and in the meantime she wanted to know what to do about the radio transceiver which she expected to receive from him. She told him that Kliemann's idea of hiding it in her gramophone was a non-starter. He agreed, and
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after referring back to his superiors announced that he would teach her to construct the transceiver from parts which she could buy in England. She would be able to use the frequency crystal which Kliemann had given her, and which she would have to hide from the eyes of the British Customs. All this had been discussed between us at meetings when I picked her up by car. She said she was sure that she was not under surveillance, and we had the same impression from Peggie's surveillance team. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, and the delay necessitated by her period of radio instruction coincided with the delay in getting her British visa. I was getting to know her and felt that she had a good feeling for her job. Everything was in order for her onward travel to Lisbon. Then she exploded her land-mine. The visa authorization had come in and Molly Gillott had made an overt call to her hotel, asking her to call at the office. When she came in she was made up and dressed to kill, and had in tow a small French poodle, which she said she was taking to England with her. I said, 'I'm afraid that is impossible. You can't take him on the flying boat. It's not allowed.' 'You can persuade them. After all, I'm going to be an important double agent.' 'I cannot persuade them. This is wartime, Lily. Every flight from Lisbon to Poole is a potential target for the Luftwaffe. As you know, they've already shot one down.' 'And you were proposing to submit me to that peril', she protested dramatically. 'Why can't I go by Gibraltar?' 'Even if you did, you would have to leave the dog in quarantine for six months. In fact, I'm not sure that they would allow even that.' 'Then I refuse to go. I will tell Hans' - her Abwehr handler 'that I have changed my mind and don't wish to be a German spy any more. I will stay here in Spain.' 'And what would you live on? The Abwehr wouldn't give you a peseta, after all the time and trouble you've cost them, and the Spaniards wouldn't issue a labour permit. And incidentally, as a self-confessed German spy you'd never be able to see your friends in England again.' 'I won't leave poor little Frisson to starve.' 'I'm sorry, but I might as well destroy this', and I showed her the Home Office authorization for the visa.
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'No', she said. 'Don't do that. You are being horrid, with all your stupid rules, but there must be a way.' A thought struck her. 'Listen. If you can get me to Gibraltar I will persuade them. My father knows a British admiral there, and the Navy are honourable people.' 'Lily, when you're fighting a war you must sometimes make sacrifices. I will find a kind owner for Frisson.' She picked him up in her arms, whispered to him in Russian, and faced me defiantly. 'You shall not have him. Poor little scrap. He knows nothing about your war; all he wants is to be with me.' I said, 'I will do what I can. Come back tomorrow at the same time.' She put on her great lady act. 'How kind you are', she said sweetly, and swept out. I had little doubt that it was going to be impossible to get that wretched dog into Britain without passing through quarantine, but the chance of being able to run a double agent back to I. Luft, in Paris, was intriguing. Kliemann would give her airforce questionnaires about squadron bases, airfields and new weaponry, all things the Wehrmachtbadly needed to know in the run-up to the Second Front, and which would be excellent subjects for our deception techniques. She had to be given a way out, for the longer she delayed her departure from Madrid the greater the danger of a security slip-up. I put the problem to Head Office in a long and fatiguing telegram. The answer was, 'Get her to Gibraltar. The Abwehr will be delighted. Then leave it to Gibraltar colleagues to sort out.' It was clever. If Kliemann could be given a legitimate reason for TREASURE to spend time in Gibraltar he would jump at the chance of giving her a special brief. Next day I told her that my Gibraltar colleagues might be able to find a way of smuggling Frisson into England, perhaps by sea, and she should tell her Abwehr handler that her father's friend, the admiral, had given her an introduction to a contact in Gibraltar who would help her. She contacted me three days later in the safe flat and said she had a personal message from Kliemann, congratulating her on making such a useful arrangement and adding a long questionnaire. We were interested to see it, but more for the things missed out than those included. It was obvious that the German Admiralty knew a great deal about our Gibraltar defences and port facilities. TREASURE asked me if I was sure that quarantine could be
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waived for her little dog, and I said my Head Office appeared to think so. She was still giving me suspicious looks when she said goodbye. We sent her to Gibraltar in the Embassy shuttle van and my two young macho colleagues there made a fuss of her, lodged her at the Rock Hotel and received instructions from Head Office about the reply she should make to Kliemann's naval questionnaire, in secret writing, of course, to a Paris address. It was a week or more before she could be sent to the UK and I cannot remember - if I ever knew - how she was transported. The one thing I did discover, with a feeling of guilt, was that Frisson was not with her. But after all, it was wartime, and sacrifices, as I had told her, had to be made by people and consciences alike. When she arrived in England, she had the good fortune to be met and taken in hand by a lady MI5 officer, who later became a close friend of ours, had a great deal of character and a very strong conviction that this, her first double agent, was going to be a success, come what might. She took Lily into her flat, dealt with her tantrums and very gradually began to get her interested in the work of a successful double agent. She had forgotten everything she had learnt about constructing a transceiver, but that did not matter, because when she had a radio message to send, it was sent by one of Hanslope's operators on a set which used her special crystal, and tapped out by TREASURE so that her 'style' would match up with the record held by the Abwehr training-school. But most of her reports went by secret writing, to Kliemann's cover address, and included personal touches which referred back to the time when she had been Kliemann's star pupil. She became a very useful agent, and was one of those who, to use the jargon of the time, 'came up for D-Day'. As the winter of 1943/4 passed and preparations for the Normandy invasion were proceeding at top speed, she was frequently told by Kliemann to find excuses for trips to Bristol and the West, and under our guidance she invented a French school-friend who invited her to spend weekends in Bristol. They spent days exploring Somerset and the moors on bicycles, according to her reports, and she described lonely countrysides and main roads which in fact were bustling from dawn to dusk, and through the nights, with troop movements. According to Masterman's book, the main weight of our forces was in the west and south-west and the Midlands, while we persuaded the Germans that it was in Scotland, the east and
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south-east. TREASURE certainly played a useful part in the great deception. By the time Paris was liberated, TREASURE's set was being operated by one of the Hanslope men, who had studied her tapping style. This meant that she could be set free to join the French ATS and go to France. But although by this time Kliemann had been arrested and was held in prison in England, the clandestine radio messages continued, again according to Masterman, as if she were still in England and Kliemann in Paris. Presumably it was pretended that Kliemann had remained in Paris in hiding. This correspondence, and perhaps TREASURE's activities as an ATS officer working with our military counter-espionage units, were said to be of considerable importance in dealings with the French spy networks. Later, she wrote a book, in French, about her experiences, and freely criticized some of her British acquaintances. She describes me, succinctly, as 'tres anglais', and from her that is not a compliment. During my last year in Madrid I was given another assistant, who was assigned an office in the Consulate General in Barcelona and had a secretary, who was also ISOS-indoctrinated. They worked well and recruited some useful agents who helped with the identification process, in particular the Lufthansa flights and the hotel lists. A member of the Barcelona Abwehr team was a recruiter and trainer for Ast Hamburg. In 1943 he decided to hedge his bets and made it known to a member of the Consulate General that he would like to meet an SIS officer. It was a risk, but the decision was taken to interview this man at night at the house of one of the Consuls, with my man present. He had heard of the Abwehr man through ISOS messages and was anxious to recruit him. The meeting went well, and double agent NETTLE was taken on. He became a useful man, because Abwehr Ast Hamburg used him to recruit agents for use in the United States, and he could choose men and women who would agree to work as double agents. Since they had nothing to lose and in fact everything to gain by becoming stooges of the American OSS, he was quite successful and was given, according to Masterman, another double agent, SHEPHERD, to help him.
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In the case of most walk-ins we never saw them more than twice before they went on their way - once when they first called at our office to make their intentions known, and the second time, possibly at a safe house, to discover the instructions of the Abwehr handler who was dealing with them in Madrid, and also to find out where they had hidden their briefs, reciphering pads, crystals and secret inks, so that British Customs would not delve too deeply into their luggage when they arrived, but let them through as smoothly as possible so that they could be picked up by their appointed case-handlers. We only learned what had happened to our agents, both the walk-ins and those whom we had identified as Abwehr spies, when we visited St Albans on leave. How they progressed, what reports they began to send back to their Abwehr controllers, what questionnaires they received and how they coped with them under MI5 instruction, were all matters dealt with by the MI5 casehandlers and the Twenty Committee. Our colleagues in Section V were only concerned with serving us in the field and liaison with MI5. It was frustrating for us to know so little about how our agents had done, but this was just another case of the 'need-toknow-rule', which was fairly strictly enforced. Kim Philby For most of my time in Madrid, Philby was head of the Iberian sub-section and therefore my boss. We met him first when we visited St Albans in the summer of 1941, and he impressed us with his knowledge of what we had been doing. We liked him, and so did all the Section V officers we met. He was excellent company and backed us up when we had trouble with the other departments of SIS. He was very keen to visit us in the field, and it was only later that I realized that his main purpose in coming to Madrid was to see again the Spain he loved. He had spent much time in the Civil War as a journalist on the Franco side, and he told us fascinating stories of his experiences, not least the one about a very famous American woman reporter, who, he said, would pick up a journalist who had spent all day at the front, put him in a taxi and have the whole story out of him before they reached the hotel. He stayed with us two or three times, both in Madrid and
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afterwards in Rome, and we came to know him well. He spoke Spanish fairly well, and knew the restaurants and night-spots in Madrid as well as we did. We took him to working-class tavernas where he ate platefuls of chopped garlic, and when we went to the bullfight, he disapproved of our seats in the shade. 'We ought to be in the Sol', he said, 'and get really wet under the arms. That's what I like.' He showed much admiration for the Russians and when I was having difficulty getting a new official car he laughed scornfully. 'If you were working for the NKVD', he said, 'you'd get whatever car you wanted at the drop of a hat.' We were all believers in Britain, even when the Empire began to fall apart, but Kim was contemptuous. 'It's time you realized', he told me, 'that we are just a small island with limited resources, and that's how we're going to stay.' When I was later posted to Rome he stayed with us again, and I took him to a luncheon at the Residence, where the Labour Counsellor was sounding off about the aims of the Labour Party. As we left Kim said furiously, 'I'd give a lot of money to hear Lenin stripping that Parteibonze's [Party boss] argument to ribbons.' It may seem strange that he spoke so freely, but I think it was because he was abroad. When he stayed with us he never hid his contempt for the way our Service was kept in the shadow of the Foreign Office and given such limited scope and resources. But one could not fail to like the man. I was driving him to Lisbon on a brilliant spring day, and he said, 'All a man wants on a day like this is someone like Ginger Rogers and a fast car.' During my Section V period I never had the slightest doubt about Philby's integrity, and was pleased when much later he was appointed head of the new Anti-Communism Section. But then I had an experience which shocked me. Some years later I developed a useful informant who was working for UNRRA and could travel freely around Italy. He was originally from a Tsarist family who escaped to England after the Revolution. He knew a number of anti-Russian exiles in Rome and among them a young man, of aristocratic origins, who had been brought up in Soviet Russia and entered government service. Then he managed to escape to Rome where, he said, he was being sought by the NKVD. He explained that he was a member of the NTS, an anti-Soviet organization which had connections both inside and outside the
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Union. Our informant suggested that we should find a safe place for the young man to live and interrogate him fully. I telegraphed Head Office immediately and asked for traces of this source and approval to go ahead. I was given a snub by the head of the Political Section, David Footman: 'We do not use emigre Russian organisations.' I was astounded. Some Tsarist emigre societies might well be phoney means of raising money from woolly-minded benefactors, but to ban the entire category was inexplicable. My agent was most disappointed, because he said his contact had a number of addresses inside Russia of people who were committed to act against the State, provided a workable programme could be evolved. I protested to London and was given the same rebuff. What struck me as so extraordinary was that Philby must have been aware of Footman's ban. Thinking it over, I became convinced that the ban on emigre groups was Kim's doing. I remembered how he had reacted to the news from the MI5 case-officer that TREASURE was developing well. 'Poor girl', he had said. 'She's in for a disappointment. Never trust a Tsarist emigre. They're all as twisty as eels.' In my resentment at the setback over our young Russian, I began to have doubts about Kim. Years later, when Philby made his escape to Moscow, Peggie and I were having a drink with Footman, who was looking shattered. 'I know', said Peggie. 'We could work out a plan to leak information to the NKVD showing that Philby was a triple-cross, that Nicholas Eliot's last meeting with him in Beirut had really been to brief him on how to make touch with our Embassy in Moscow. I'll bet they'd swallow the story, if we did it craftily.' 'But the NKVD would shoot him', protested David, shocked to the core. 'Yes', said Peggie happily, 'and serve him bloody right.' I will try to summarize my thoughts about Philby, who betrayed us all, the friends with whom he had drunk endless gins in the Snakepit at Glenalmond, in St Albans. We had liked and admired him, and were left feeling unclean. He had no loyalties, either to HMG, or friends, or the women he married. I do not think he had any special feelings about Soviet Russia and the warped form of communism it had evolved. What he admired was Lenin and his ruthless power, and above all the KGB, with its immense potentials, its refined as well as brutal methods, and its supreme effectiveness. To be a functioning part of that highly sophisticated machine had been his highest ambition.
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I still resent the fact that he must have made notes about my personality and failings, like those of my colleagues, and sent them to Moscow d toutes fins utiles. As 1943 progressed, the hectic level of activity we had maintained in the earlier years eased off. It was an enormous help to have Jack Ivens and his secretary, not least because they could share the encoding and decoding of ISOS messages which had previously been done exclusively by my wife and myself, and our agent in Barcelona was proving a very useful operator. We could now spare time to investigate the links between Abwehr Madrid and their agents in the UK. Obviously, there had to be cover addresses in Spain to which the German 'agents' in the UK could write their secret ink messages and reports. The most famous of the double agents run from Abwehr Madrid was Juan Pujol, known to us as GARBO, whose MI5 files, containing his reports to his case-officer, probably Major Kieckebusch in the German Embassy, and the correspondence with the Twenty Committee about what he should and should not report, filled many volumes. We succeeded in identifying the Spanish cut-out who received GARBO's letters and sent him the replies, all of course in secret inks, as dictated by Kieckebusch. We also spotted some of the other go-betweens, but I cannot recall their identities. It took some time after a spy landed in England before he could be trusted to do exactly what his case-officer ordered, and the briefing of the double agents had to be orchestrated very carefully to develop the themes developed by the Twenty Committee. Masterman writes: 'The basic idea of the deception policy during 1943 and up to the beginning of the winter was to contain the maximum enemy forces in Western Europe and the Mediterranean areas, and thus discourage their transfer to the Russian Front.' But during the winter, and the spring of 1944, all emphasis turned to the strategic deception policy which directed German attention towards the Pas de Calais coasts and the notional 'First American Army'. We never knew which of our double agents were used for deception and which for just keeping the Abwehr case-officer satisfied. Once they had left for Lisbon, they vanished from our sight. It was only ARTIST, on his trips to Madrid and Lisbon, and TRICYCLE and GARBO, who both visited Spain during this period, whose movements we could trace.
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In September 1943 the Allies landed at Salerno and pushed into Italy against great resistance. Our Supreme Command always tended to underestimate the tactical brilliance and strength of the German army in retreat, and, optimistically, Whitehall decided to lose no time in establishing an embassy in Rome, with an MI6 station, which I should head. In October we ended our Madrid assignment, with great regret, and I handed over to 'Freckles' Wren, an experienced Section V officer. To our delight, Peggie was to be allowed to join me in the Rome posting. The reason was simple. We were, I think, the only members of Section V who spoke Italian. For the Allies, Italy proved 'not the soft underbelly of the Axis, but its spiny backbone', and it was July 1944 before we could open the Rome Embassy, having spent months in Algiers and Naples. Even so, it was done with great difficulty, chiefly because nobody had realized that Embassies or High Commissions, in a country under military occupation, had to have some military status, if only to be provided with premises, transport and food. We drove into Rome in a coal lorry and had no cars of our own until a friend of ours in the Interservices Liaison Department (ISLD), the military arm of SIS, 'liberated' an ancient V8 Lancia Astura, without shock absorbers or synchronization, and gave it to us. It was some time before we could get rations, and again had to depend on the ISLD to provide them. Even then we were at the mercy of careless ration NCOs and became accustomed to finding tablets of unwrapped soap in the bags of flour. Before leaving the story of our work in Spain, it may be useful to say a little about Section V's place in the intelligence hierarchy. It is well known that there was always a built-in animosity between SIS, which was directed by the Foreign Office, and MI5, which owed its allegiance to the Home Office, and this continued even after a Director-General of MI5 (Sir Dick White) was transferred to be Chief of SIS. But during the war years, in the localized battle to exploit ISOS and defeat the Abwehr's army of spies, this animosity ceased to exist. The relations between us, in the field and in our headquarters at St Albans, and our colleagues in MI5, were intimate - or at least so I found them. Looking back, it is sometimes difficult to recall who was MI5 and who was Section V. We were in constant touch with Tar Robertson, Tommy Harris and Anthony Blunt, and also members of the Twenty Committee. There was no feeling of rivalry, because we were all involved in
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the same task. A factor which facilitated this close relationship was the broad difference between the Section V type of officer and his counterparts in other sections of MI6. I was one of the very few in Section V who had had SIS experience abroad. The others were recruited from the Services, especially the Intelligence Corps, or business, or straight from university and school. Charles de Salis, John Bruce Lockhart and Martin Lloyd had been schoolmasters, Jack Ivens a wholesale fruit-dealer, Ralph Jarvis a banker, Desmond Bristow an Intelligence Corps officer. Our colleagues in MI5 also had a variety of backgrounds; Tomas Harris was an antiques dealer, Anthony Blunt an art historian, Kenneth Younger a soldier. By contrast, the SIS officers I had known in my earlier career had all been exNavy or Rhine Army officers and those I was to meet in England were mostly from the Army and Navy, with later additions from the former Colonial and Commonwealth Services. They would all have been a little baffled by the rarefied, High Table atmosphere of St Albans. Partly owing to this diversity of backgrounds and attitudes, relations between Section V and the rest of MI6 became strained, and a feeling against ex-Section V officers remained. It was due in part, of course, to the fact that our work could not be mentioned outside St Albans and later Ryder Street, to which we were transferred in 1943. Very few officers in Head Office had been indoctrinated into the ISOS mystique, and the others could not understand why we had such large staffs and other amenities which were denied them. Bobby Mackenzie, who became Section V Head of Station in Paris, said to me, 'If you take my advice you'll keep your head well down for the next five years.' This I did.
Notes
The names of SIS officers, secretaries, informants and agents, many of which appeared in Mr Benton's original text, were excised at the request of the Security Section of his Service. 1. Cf. John Masterman, The Double-Cross System (New Haven, CT 1972). 2. There were three kinds of false passports: false-real, in which a genuine
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passport (perhaps stolen or bought) was filled in with forged details of the holder; real-false, in which the genuine personal details of the holder were entered on a passport that had been manufactured illegally; and false-false, in which both details and passport were forged. 3. He met TRICYCLE in Lisbon. It was a curious situation. Each thought the other was ripe for going over to us, but neither would take the risk of suggesting it, so ARTIST never knew that TRICYCLE was one of our long-standing and prolific agents.
Kenneth Benton The author's career in SIS ended with his posting as counsellor of Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, 1966-8. He then began to write novels and produced ten thrillers and two historical novels, Death on the Appian Way and Ward of Caesar. Since 1986, he has only written short stories and the beginning of his autobiography, but was observer for several seminars of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, for which he wrote The Security of the Oil Route (1973).

Kenneth Benton, The ISOS Years Madrid 1941-3

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The ISOS Years: Madrid 1941-3 Author(s): Kenneth Benton Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No.

Journal of Contemporary History

Benton: The ISOS Years

Journal of Contemporary History

Benton: The ISOS Years

Journal of Contemporary History

Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

Journal of Contemporary History

Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years The Beginnings: Madrid 1941

Journal of Contemporary History

Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

Journal of Contemporary History

Benton: The ISOS Years

Journal of Contemporary History

Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

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Benton: The ISOS Years

Journal of Contemporary History

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