Storm Island Read online

  Godliman's opinion espionage made no difference to anything anyhow; but

  now, he found, it was populated by amateurs, and he was delighted to

  discover that he knew half the people in MI5. On his first day he met

  a barrister who was a member of his club, an art historian with whom he

  had been to college, an archivist from his own university, and his

  favourite writer of detective stories.

  He was shown into Colonel Terry's office at ten a.m. Terry had been

  there for several hours: there were two empty cigarette packets in the

  waste-paper bin.

  Godliman said: "Should I call you "Sir" now?"

  "There's not much bull around here, Percy.

  "Uncle Andrew" will do fine. Sit down."

  All the same, there was a briskness about Terry which had not been

  present when they had lunch at the Savoy. Godliman noticed that he did

  not smile, and his attention kept wandering to a pile of unread signals

  on the desk.

  Terry looked at his watch and said: "I'm going to put youin the

  picture, briefly finish the lecture I started over lunch."

  Godliman smiled.

  "This time I won't get up on my high horse."

  Terry lit another cigarette.

  Canaris's spies in Britain were useless people (Terry resumed, as if

  their conversation had been interrupted five minutes rather than three

  months ago). Dorothy O'Grady was typical: we caught her cutting

  military telephone wires on the Isle of Wight. She was writing letters

  to Portugal in the kind of secret ink you buy in joke shops.

  A new wave of spies began in September. Their task was to reconnoitre

  Britain in preparation for the invasion: to map beaches suitable for

  landings, fields and roads which could be used by troop-carrying

  gliders, tank traps and road blocks and barked-wire obstacles.

  They seem to have been badly selected, hastily mustered, inadequately

  trained and poorly equipped. Typical were the four who came over on

  the night of 2-3 September: Meier, Kieboom, Pons and Waldberg. Kieboom

  and Pens landed at dawn near Hythe, and were arrested by Private

  Tollervey of the Somerset Light Infantry, who came upon them in the

  sand-dunes tucking in to a dirty great wurst.

  Waldberg actually managed to send a signal to Hamburg: ARRIVED

  SAFELY.

  DOCUMENT DESTROYED. ENGLISH PATROL 200 METRES FROM COAST. BEACH

  WITH

  BROWN NETS AND RAILWAY SLEEPERS AT A DISTANCE OF 50 METRES. NO

  MINES.

  FEW SOLDIERS. UNFINISHED BLOCKHOUSE. NEW ROAD. WALDBERG.

  Clearly he did not know where he was, nor did he even have a code name.

  The quality of his briefing is indicated by the fact that he knew

  nothing of English licensing laws: he went into a pub at nine o'clock

  in the morning and asked for a quart of cider.

  (Godliman laughed at this, and Terry said: "Wait it gets funnier.") The

  landlord told Waldberg to come back at ten. He could spend the hour

  looking at the village church, he suggested.

  Amazingly, Waldberg was back at ten sharp, whereupon two policemen on

  bicycles arrested him.

  ("It's like a script for It's That Man Again,"said Godliman.) Meier was

  found a few hours later. Eleven more agents were picked up over the

  next few weeks, most of them within hours of landing on British soil.

  Almost all of them were destined for the scaffold.

  ("Almost all?" said Godliman. Terry said: "Yes. A couple have been

  handed over to our section B-ia). I'll come back to that in a

  minute.") Others landed in Eire. One was Ernst Weber-Drohl, a

  well-known acrobat who had two illegitimate children in Ireland he had

  toured music-halls there as "The World's Strongest Man'. He was

  arrested by the Garda Siochana, fined three pounds, and turned over to

  B-ia).

  Another was Hermann Goetz, who parachuted into Ulster instead of Eire

  by mistake, was robbed by the IRA, swam the Boyne in his fur underwear,

  and eventually swallowed his suicide pill. He had a torch marked "Made

  in Dresden'.

  ("If it's so easy to pick these bunglers up," Terry said, 'why are we

  taking on brainy types like yourself to catch them? Two reasons. One:

  we've got no way of knowing how many we haven't picked up. Two: it's

  what we do with the ones we don't hang that matters. This is where

  B-ia) comes in. But to explain that I have to go back to 1936.")

  Alfred George Owens was an electrical engineer with a company that had

  a few government contracts. He visited Germany several times during

  the thirties, and voluntarily gave to the Admiralty odd bits of

  technical information he picked up there. Eventually Naval

  Intelligence passed him on to MI6 who began to develop him as an agent.

  The Abwehr recruited him at about the same time, as MI6 discovered when

  they intercepted a letter from him to a known German cover address.

  Clearly he was a man totally without loyalty: he just wanted to be a

  spy. We called him "Snow'; the Germans called him "Johnny'.

  In January 1939 Snow got a letter containing (i) instructions for the

  use of a wireless transmitter and (ii) a ticket for the cloakroom at

  Victoria Station.

  He was arrested the day after war broke out, and he and his

  transmitter (which he had picked up, in a suitcase, when he presented

  the cloakroom ticket) were locked up in Wands-worth Prison. He

  continued to communicate with Hamburg, but now all the messages were

  written by section B-ia) of

  MI5.

  The Abwehr put him in touch with two more German agents in England,

  whom we immediately nabbed. They also gave him a code and detailed

  wireless procedure, all of which was invaluable.

  Snow was followed by Charlie, Rainbow, Summer, Biscuit, and eventually

  a small army of enemy spies, all in regular contact with Canaris, all

  apparently trusted by him, and all totally controlled by the British

  counter-intelligence apparatus.

  At that point MI5 began dimly to glimpse an awesome and tantalizing

  prospect: with a bit of luck, they could control and manipulate the

  entire German espionage network in Britain.

  "Turning agents into double agents instead of hanging them has two

  crucial advantages," Terry wound up.

  "Since the enemy thinks his spies are still active, he doesn't try to

  replace them with others who may not get caught. And, since we are

  supplying the information the spies tell their controllers, we can

  deceive the enemy and mislead his strategists."

  "It can't be that easy," said Godliman.

  "Certainly not." Terry opened a window to let out the fug of cigarette

  and pipe smoke.

  "To work, the system has to be very nearly total. If there is any

  substantial number of genuine agents here, their information will

  contradict that of the double agents and the Abwehr will smell a

  rat."

  "It sounds tremendously exciting," Godliman said. His pipe had gone

  out.

  Terry smiled for the first time that morning.

  "The people here will tell you it's hard work long hours, high tension,

  frustration but yes, of course it's exciting." He looked at his

  wa
tch.

  "Now I want you to meet a very bright young member of my staff. Let me

  walk you to his office."

  They went out of the room, up some stairs, and along several

  corridors.

  "His name is Frederick Bloggs, and he gets annoyed if you make jokes

  about it," Terry continued.

  "We pinched him from Scotland Yard he was an inspector with Special

  Branch. If you need arms and legs, use his. You'll rank above him,

  but I shouldn't make too much of that we don't, here. I suppose I

  hardly need to say that to you."

  They entered a small, bare room which looked out on to a blank wall.

  There was no carpet. A photograph of a pretty girl hung on the wall,

  and there was a pair of handcuffs on the hat-stand.

  Terry said: "Frederick Bloggs, Percival Godliman. I'll leave you to

  it."

  The man behind the desk was blond, stocky and short he must have been

  only just tall enough to get into the police force, Godliman thought.

  His tie was an eyesore, but he had a pleasant, open face and an

  attractive grin. His handshake was firm.

  He said: "Tell you what, Percy I was just going to nip home for lunch

  why don't you come along? The wife makes a lovely sausage and chips."

  He had a broad cockney accent.

  Sausage and chips was not Godliman's favourite meal, but he went along.

  They walked to Trafalgar Square and caught a bus to Hoxton. Bloggs

  said: "I married a wonderful girl, but she can't cook for nuts. I have

  sausage and chips every day."

  East London was still smoking from the previous night's air raid. They

  passed groups of firemen and volunteers digging through rubble, playing

  hoses over dying fires, and clearing debris from the streets. They saw

  an old man carry a precious radio out of a half-ruined house.

  Godliman made conversation.

  "So we're to catch spies together."

  "We'Uhaveago'Perce."

  Blogg's home was a three-bedroom semi in a street of exactly similar

  houses. The tiny front gardens were all being used to grow vegetables.

  Mrs. Bloggs was the pretty girl in the photograph on the office wall.

  She looked tired. Bloggs said: "She drives an ambulance during the

  raids, don't you, love?" He was proud of her. Her name was

  Christine.

  She said: "Every morning when I come home I wonder if the house will

  still be here."

  "Notice it's the house she's worried about, not me Bloggs said.

  Godliman picked up a medal in a presentation case from the

  mantelpiece.

  "How did you get this?"

  Christine answered.

  "He took a shotgun off a villain who was robbing a post office."

  "You're quite a pair," Godliman said.

  "You married, Percy?" Bloggs asked.

  "I'm a widower."

  "Sorry."

  "My wife died of tuberculosis in 1930. We never had any children."

  "We're not having any yet," Bloggs said.

  "Not while the world's in this state."

  Christine said: "Oh, Fred, he's not interested in that!" She went out

  to the kitchen.

  They sat around a square table in the centre of the room to eat. Bloggs

  was touched by this couple and the domestic scene, and found himself

  thinking of his Eleanor. That was unusual: he had been immune to

  sentiment for some years. Perhaps the nerves were coming alive again,

  at last. War did funny things.

  Christine's cooking was truly awful. The sausages were burned. Bloggs

  drowned his meal in tomato ketchup, and Godliman cheerfully followed

  suit.

  When they got back to Whitehall Bloggs showed Godliman the file on

  unidentified enemy agents still thought to be operating in Britain.

  There were three sources of information about such people. The first

  was the immigration records of the Home Office. Passport control had

  long been an arm of Military Intelligence, and there was a list going

  back to the last war of aliens who had entered the country but had not

  left or been accounted for in other ways, such as death or

  naturalization. At the outbreak of war they had all gone before

  tribunals which classified them in three groups. At first only "A'

  class aliens were interned; but by July of 1940, after some

  scare-mongering by Fleet Street, the "B' and "C' classes were taken out

  of circulation. There was a small number of immigrants who could not

  be located, and it was a fair assumption that some of them were

  spies.

  Their papers were in Blogg's file.

  The second source was wireless transmissions. Section C of MI5 scanned

  the airwaves nightly, recorded everything they did not know for certain

  to be ours, and passed it to the Government Code and Cypher School.

  This outfit, which had recently been moved from London's Berkeley

  Street to a country house at Bletchley Park, was not a school at all

  but a collection of chess champions, musicians, mathematicians and

  crossword-puzzle enthusiasts dedicated to the belief that if a man

  could invent a code a man could crack it. Signals originating in the

  UK which could not be accounted for by any of the Services were assumed

  to be messages from spies.

  The decoded messages were in Blogg's file.

  Finally there were the double agents; but their value was largely

  hoped-for rather than actual. Messages to them from the Abwehr had

  warned of several incoming agents, and had given away one resident spy

  Mrs. Matilda Krafft of Bournemouth, who had sent money to Snow by post

  and was subsequently incarcerated in Holloway prison. But the doubles

  had not been able to reveal the identity or location of the kind of

  quietly effective professional spies who are most valuable to a secret

  intelligence service. No one doubted that there were such people.

  There were clues: someone, for example, had brought Snow's transmitter

  over from Germany and deposited it in the cloakroom at Victoria Station

  for him to collect. But either the Abwehr or the spies themselves were

  too cautious to be caught by the doubles.

  However, the clues were in Blogg's file.

  Other sources were being developed: the boffins were working to improve

  methods of triangulation (the directional pin-pointing of radio

  transmitters); and MI6 were trying to rebuild the networks of agents in

  Europe which had sunk beneath the tidal wave of Hitler's armies.

  What little information there was, was in Blogg's file.

  "It can be infuriating at times," he told Godliman.

  "Look at this."

  He took from the file a long radio intercept about British plans for an

  expeditionary force for Finland.

  "This was picked up early in the year. The information is impeccable.

  They were trying to get a fix on him when he broke off in the middle,

  for no apparent reason perhaps he was interrupted. He resumed a few

  minutes later, but he was off the air again before our boys had a

  chance to plug in."

  Godliman said: "What's this "Regards to Willi"?"

  "Now, that's important," said Bloggs. He was getting enthusiastic.

  "Here's a scrap of another message, quite recent. Look "Regards to

  Willi". This time there was
a reply. He's addressed as "Die

  Nadel"."

  "The Needle."

  "This bloke's a pro. Look at his messages: terse, economical, but

  detailed and completely unambiguous."

  Godliman studied the fragment of the second message.

  "It appears to be about the effects of the bombing."

  "He's obviously toured the East End. A pro, a pro."

  "What else do we know about Die Nadel?"

  Bloggs's expression of youthful eagerness collapsed comically. That's

  it, I'm afraid."

  "His code name is Die Nadel, he signs off "Regards to Willi", and he

  has good information and that's it?"

  "Fraid so."

  Godliman sat on the edge of the desk and stared out of the window. On

  the wall of the opposite building, underneath an ornate windowsill, he

  could see the nest of a house-marten.

  "On that basis, what chance have we of catching him?"

  Bloggs shrugged.

  "On that basis, none at all."

  FIVE

  It is for places like this that the word 'bleak has been invented.