The illusionist, p.21
The Illusionist, page 21
None of this on its own had been enough to persuade the Abwehr to take him back. But it had meant that when they discovered they could no longer break the American code, they grabbed onto Nicosoff with enthusiasm. At the start of July, the Abwehr began grading his reports as ‘credible’. German agents were known as ‘Vertrauensmann’, meaning ‘trusted man’, or ‘V-Mann’ for short. By August, Abwehr reports were sourcing information from the ‘Reliable V-Mann Roberto’.
Objectively, this makes little sense. The Abwehr knew he had passed them false information the previous year. If an agent was compromised in 1941, it was implausible for him to uncompromise himself in 1942. The staff of SIME, though happy about the breakthrough, were surprised that it had happened. The Germans, they felt, should be better than this.
This is a persistent view. Ever since the end of the war, there has been a theory that German intelligence was riddled with anti-Nazis who were deliberately passing on poor information in order to hasten the fall of Hitler. Much of the evidence for this comes from the success that the Allies had at putting over their deceptions. Surely, goes the argument, these clever and efficient officers couldn’t have been so comprehensively taken in.
It’s certainly the case that many Abwehr officers were accused of plotting against Hitler. The service’s chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was among those killed in the wake of the 1944 attempt on the Fuhrer’s life. And within A Force there were staff who were sure that Clarke had been able to put his ‘stories’ over so effectively because he’d been helped from the other side.
But there is a simpler explanation for the failure of German intelligence. While it was natural for the British to believe that the enemy who had beaten them so often was fearsome and powerful, in fact parts of the German war machine were in terrible shape. And its intelligence service in particular was a disaster.
All intelligence agencies face similar pressures: to answer questions with more certainty than they should; to conceal mistakes; to put too much trust in the sources that they have; and to belittle internal or external rivals. Allied intelligence was subject to each of these, as shown by the weeks of tense discussion over changing the code used by Fellers. In the middle of 1942, MI6 was still refusing to share much of the information it gleaned from Bletchley Park with either MI5 or SIME.
But whatever problems there were within Allied intelligence were nothing to the difficulties on the other side. The Abwehr was a part of the German military, but one that was regarded as a career dead end, so it struggled to recruit high-calibre staff.
Canaris was a schemer and a climber, rather than an administrator or an organiser. He built no system for cross-checking information or assessing its quality. The men who prospered underneath him were often scoundrels, charmers who saw a chance to spend the war living large in a neutral city at someone else’s expense. ‘He chose worthless officers,’ an MI6 report observed, and then allowed them to do as they pleased.
Those officers, in their turn, recruited poor agents to do their spying. Some, like Renato Levi, were planning to betray the Germans from the moment they were approached. Other Abwehr agents included people who had been blackmailed into becoming spies with threats against their families, or who agreed to do the work to escape prison. In some cases they took the job to escape Nazi territory, and with the intention of handing themselves in to the Allies the first chance they got.
Having selected substandard agents, Canaris’s men trained them badly. Captured Germans were found to be confused by British currency and military structures. These were, fundamentally, not good spies.
But in the early years of the war Canaris had won favour by giving the impression that he had eyes and ears everywhere. The last thing he wanted to do was encourage people to start questioning the reliability of those eyes and ears.
Hitler’s government was a court of competing factions, all seeking the Fuhrer’s approval. The Abwehr, responsible for military intelligence, had a vicious rival in Department VI of the Reich Main Security Office, the foreign intelligence service of the SS. Canaris knew that to admit a mistake was to give ammunition to his internal enemies. His officers likewise had no incentive to think critically about the quality of their own work. Quite the opposite. An ideological and murderous regime like Nazi Germany is not a place where people flourish by asking difficult questions or speaking truth to power.
Maunsell took a straightforward view of why the Germans had been deceived. ‘Because the Abwehr was a thoroughly corrupt organisation, careless, dilettante and foreign to exact administration which is essential to good intelligence work,’ he recalled after the war. He believed they were more interested in being able to show evidence of their work than in being honest about its quality: ‘The whole organisation was permeated with “pins in the map syndrome”.’
Some Abwehr officers did suspect that some of their agents had been captured and were operating under British control. But they also suspected, probably correctly, that saying anything would put their own necks on the line. According to MI6, Abwehr officers who were perceptive enough to see the necessity of a proper system of intelligence assessment ‘were corrupt enough to see the necessity of preventing it’.
The Abwehr had also failed to grasp something about their enemy. Both the German and Italian models of total war placed great emphasis on the army. The British and Americans had a different approach, putting men into industry and air and naval forces. Nearly four-fifths of the German military was in the army, compared to three-fifths of the British forces. But Axis intelligence services never understood this. That explained why Clarke had found it so easy to persuade them that the British army was larger than it was: they were already looking for the troops they were sure must exist somewhere.
The national stereotypes of the war are of ruthlessly organised Germans facing English gentleman amateurs. In the deception battle the opposite was the case. German intelligence was chaotic and poorly controlled, while A Force’s rigorous, tedious bureaucracy of deception, patiently building the stories of notional units over months and ultimately years, helped the deceivers to keep their story straight and to steadily pass over small jigsaw pieces of mutually reinforcing misinformation that carefully led the recipients to the wrong conclusion.
Between them, Italian and German intelligence knew quite enough to render Cheese suspect. The channel had been handed to them by Renato Levi, who was sufficiently tainted that the Italians had him in prison. It had been used to pass bad information. There were other question marks. Abwehr officers in Athens noted that when atmospheric interference had stopped most of their wireless stations from successfully transmitting, their man ‘Roberto’ had stayed on the air. This was a clue that he was better equipped, or a better radio operator, than they’d been led to believe.
But with no other sources in Cairo, and superiors who only wanted to hear about successes, the best course was to silence their doubts and keep on believing.
The counter-intelligence officers at SIME would get a sense of the Abwehr’s problems in late July, when they picked up two German spies. Almost everything about the men’s story was glamorous: they had got to Egypt by crossing the desert from Sudan, under the guidance of a renowned explorer, Count Laszlo Almasy. Once in Cairo they had taken shelter with a belly dancer, and then set themselves up in a houseboat on the Nile. Even the name of their mission was first-rate: Operation Condor.
The one part of their story that was disappointing was the actual espionage. This they had found difficult. They couldn’t get their radio to work – not their fault, as the unit that was supposed to be listening for their signals had been captured – and they weren’t especially good at finding things out.
The pair spent their afternoons at the cinema and their evenings at nightclubs and casinos. They had been sent with plenty of money, but the wrong sort: they had British pounds, which weren’t legal in Egypt, and they’d had to change them on the black market. Their hope was that British officers, bought enough drinks, would reveal things they shouldn’t. In reality the spies found that while nightclubs were fun, they were burning through their cash without anything to show for it.
Then they’d had a stroke of luck. They’d made contact with some Egyptian army officers who wanted to help Rommel. One of them, a signals officer, offered to try to fix their wireless. His name was Anwar al-Sadat.
And just as things seemed to be looking up for the pair, their adventure ended. At dawn the next day, the police arrived, guided there by SIME. One of the people the spies had approached for help had hinted to the British that he knew something. SIME, not an outfit to beat about the bush, had kidnapped him and promised not to shoot him if he told all he knew. The spies were imprisoned, as was al-Sadat, who had a much brighter future in front of him than was obvious in the summer of 1942.
As they looked into the case, the SIME officers got a very mixed picture. At one level, Condor was a sophisticated operation that had successfully infiltrated two spies into Cairo, where they had in turn made contact with useful sources in the shape of disaffected Egyptian officers. At another, it was a mess. The men had been sent with the wrong currency – a failure of the most basic preparation – and not much in the way of a clear idea of what they were to do when they got there. They had spent a huge amount of money for no result, and been picked up within weeks. The military wireless unit that was listening for their signals had been allowed to go somewhere where it was caught, and there had been no backup plan for communication.
There was however a clear upside for Simpson as he continued building up Nicosoff. At the start of August, he was able to signal to the Abwehr that two German spies and a number of civilians had been arrested in Cairo. He was their only source in the city, and they decided they had better trust him.
Chapter 30
When Nicosoff had last enjoyed the status of a reliable Axis source, the previous autumn, Shearer had treated him as a disposable asset, one that could be used in order to help deliver a surprise for Crusader, and then abandoned. But since then Clarke had sat with the Twenty Committee in London and seen how a double agent could become a long-term property. His deceptive ambitions had also grown.
Starting that July, a committee chaired by Clarke would meet each day at A Force headquarters to decide on the day’s message, which would be transmitted that evening. To explain Nicosoff’s increased output, he was given a new network, starting with a girlfriend, ‘Marie’. In messages to the Abwehr, she was Nicosoff’s ‘amie’. A Force gave her the codename ‘Misanthrope’.
The Cheese messages suggested that Nicosoff was far from the only man in Cairo who was beguiled by ‘Marie’s’ charms. She seemed to have a wide acquaintance among the city’s military circles. She also served as an insurance policy for Cheese. Warrant Officer Ellis, the original wireless operator playing Nicosoff, had been replaced by a Sergeant Shears, but he too was becoming worn down by the work. Wireless transmission styles are distinctive, and the team feared using someone else in place of Shears: at one point he’d had to be brought from hospital on a stretcher in order to transmit a message. Now ‘Marie’ would be able to send signals, allowing them to use another operator.
One of the rules adopted by the Twenty Committee in London was that the double-cross agents it ran should live the lives they described to their German controllers. If they were told to go and look at a factory, they made the journey, and tried to find as much as they could. Clarke imported that rule to Cairo. As Nicosoff was supposed to be spending his time hanging around Cairo chatting to soldiers, the team was able to describe his life without difficulty. But he was now going to be sending ‘Marie’ on missions, and they needed someone to play her.
SIME found the perfect woman in its Greek section. Evangeline Palidou was twenty-nine years old, a Cretan whose experiences under German occupation had left her with a loathing of the Nazis. She had an impressive effect on the men of SIME and A Force, especially when they discovered that she carried a miniature revolver in her handbag and knew how to use it. She was rumoured to have shot a man, or, in another version, pushed him off a roof. Clarke’s mind was never far from Hollywood, and he saw in Palidou something of the femme fatale. Though she was a brunette, he christened her the ‘Blonde Gun Moll’, and the name stuck, with references to ‘the BGM’ appearing throughout the Cheese files.I
Palidou was asked to keep notes of the badges and vehicle signs she saw in her daily life, just as ‘Marie’ was doing. When ‘Marie’ was sent to Alexandria to find out about the feelings of the French sailors who remained loyal to the Vichy government, it was Palidou who went in reality.
But if Rommel’s advance into Egypt had given Nicosoff a reason to stay on the air, his failure to break through in July took A Force back to an earlier problem: how could they plausibly explain the agent continuing to work when he wasn’t being paid? In June, Nicosoff had told his controller he needed £1,000. In July, he said it was now £1,400, and complained that he wasn’t able to borrow any more. Clarke and his team began to worry. How long could they keep things going if the Germans didn’t start paying?
Then, at the start of August, a Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Sikh, on anti-submarine operations to cover a convoy at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, picked up a suspected U-boat. For ten hours the Sikh, joined by three more destroyers, hunted its prey, before finally U-372 was forced to the surface. Though the submarine quickly sank again, the crew were rescued. One of them was an Arab, carrying bundles of notes in different currencies totalling roughly £1,400, which he said he’d been told to deliver to a ‘Paul’ in Cairo.
This was welcome proof that the Abwehr believed in Cheese, but it didn’t solve Nicosoff’s money problem. He could hardly admit to knowing about the U-boat and its courier. Instead he continued to complain ever more vociferously. In October, his controllers replied that they were trying again, and asked for a place in Cairo where he could be given money. This presented A Force with several problems, chiefly that Nicosoff didn’t exist.
One option would be to get someone to impersonate him, but that would mean finding someone who could pull off playing a Middle Eastern Slav. If that weren’t challenge enough, they didn’t know what kind of physical description the absent Renato Levi might have given of his recruit. It would be safer, they decided, if he sent his girlfriend ‘Marie’. Enter, once again, the BGM.
For a month before the proposed rendezvous, Palidou was drilled on the story that Simpson and A Force had written for her. It told the whole story of how she had met the imaginary ‘Paul Nicosoff’, how he had gradually inducted her into his secret life and then made her his partner in espionage. It offered particular details that Nicosoff had attributed to her in previous messages: her real trip to Alexandria, and her imaginary sighting of more than 100 tanks crossing one of the Cairo bridges.
‘It will be her role not willingly to reveal information about herself or Paul, but rather to be constantly on the defensive,’ wrote one of the SIME officers on the case. ‘This will be naturally explained by the extreme nervousness of both herself and Paul. She will refer more than once to the recent execution of five spies at Aleppo; she may also mention the arrest of the two German spies on a houseboat, and the spate of arrests they brought in their train.’
The next question was where to hold the meeting. SIME had taken a flat in Cairo for exactly this purpose, but when they considered simply sending the address to the Abwehr, they realised that this might allow the enemy to put it under surveillance. Better to have the meeting in a public place. Palidou identified a cafe, and sat waiting in it on the arranged date, wearing a white dress with a red belt. Outside a SIME man masqueraded as a taxi driver, with two of his colleagues lurking within sight. No courier came. The following evening they tried again, and again no one showed up. Nicosoff sent a plaintive message to his controllers. ‘Do you think this is all so simple?’ came the grumpy reply.
If he had thought that, the following months would have disabused him. The Abwehr promised to deliver the money to a different address, concealed in a bottle of milk. It never came. More deliveries failed. At least once, it was clear that the courier had done a runner with the cash.
By the middle of 1943, A Force had concluded that Nicosoff was only going to get paid if they arranged it themselves. In one of the odder moments of an odd war, Clarke found himself dispatching a courier to Istanbul to transport money on behalf of an enemy spy agency, to pay a non-existent agent who was betraying them.
In all this, Clarke saw the funny side. There was a fashion in Cairo at the time for writing limericks about the city’s notables. Clarke produced his own Most Secret effort:
Nicosoff’s a Russian name
And not what you might think,
A form of Oriental vice,
Or buggery, or drink.
A scion of this noble house,
An unattractive sod,
Was Stanislas P. Nicosoff
Of Nizhni Novgorod.
The Abwehr weren’t in on the joke. Bletchley Park’s codebreakers had picked up an obvious change in the way the Germans were talking about ‘Roberto’, as they called Nicosoff. In the first half of 1942, mentions of his reports were picked up only twice. Then, in July alone, he appeared in Abwehr signals fifteen times. At the start of July, his name was accompanied by a warning: ‘Reliability of agent not yet fully proved.’ Within days that had changed. His reports were suddenly ‘credible’, and he gave information ‘reliably’. By the end of the month he was ‘trustworthy’. The Athens Abwehr station set up a direct link with Rommel’s army, to pass ‘Nicosoff’s’ messages on faster.
Clarke often described himself as someone who was producing a show. The best way of assessing how he was doing, he said, was ‘by the reactions of the audience’. In his first year in the job, those reactions had come sporadically, in the form of captured documents. Now he was starting to receive a steadier flow of information on the Abwehr’s thinking from an intelligence source codenamed ‘Triangle’ – in reality decrypts of the traffic from the Athens Abwehr to Rommel.
