The Mediterranean Double-Cross System, 1941-1945

Brett Lintott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351840422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book describes and analyzes the history of the Mediterranean "Double-Cross System" of the Second World War, an intelligence operation run primarily by British officers which turned captured German spies into double agents. Through a complex system of coordination, they were utilized from 1941 to the end of the war in 1945 to secure Allied territory through security and counter-intelligence operations, and also to deceive the German military by passing false information about Allied military planning and operations.

The primary questions addressed by the book are: how did the double-cross-system come into existence; what effects did it have on the intelligence war and the broader military conflict; and why did it have those effects? The book contains chapters assessing how the system came into being and how it was organized, and also chapters which analyze its performance in security and counter-intelligence operations, and in deception.

1 Double-agent operations from the outbreak of war to November 1942

If Benito Mussolini had not been such a desperate opportunist, there may not have been any double agents of consequence in North Africa and the Middle East during the Second World War. In September 1939, recognizing his own military weakness despite his so-called Pact of Steel with Hitler, the Italian dictator chose ‘non-belligerency,’ as he termed it. The unexpected fall of France in June 1940, however, opened new vistas for a reborn Roman Empire. With the French subdued, Mussolini decided to launch a ‘parallel war’ in North Africa. He was eager because, as Britain was bound to negotiate a surrender in short order, he needed a military triumph, both for domestic consumption and to enhance his bargaining position in the post-war settlement.¹ Italy declared war on 10 June. On 13 September 1940, over the strenuous objections of the commander on the spot, Marshal Graziani, Italian troops invaded Egypt from their colony of Libya. The North African state was independent and neutral, but home to vital British military installations and under British imperial influence.² Halting 200 kilometres inside the Egyptian frontier, the Italians sat until December when, no doubt contrary to their own expectations, a much smaller British force pushed them back deep into Libya.³ Hitler, who had an uncharacteristic affection for the Duce, bailed him out, not for the first time and not for the last. Hitler also had more hard-headed reasons for intervening. Italian armies launched from Albania had also failed against stout Greek resistance, and the Germans were concerned that Mussolini’s rule could collapse, leaving them without their major ally.⁴ Command of the German North African force was given to General Erwin Rommel, who had burnished his reputation commanding the 7th Panzer Division in France. He landed in Tripoli on 12 February 1941 with a small force of light and armoured troops, putting an end to the parallel war which had also foundered in Greece.⁵ Rommel also, as it turned out, nearly put an end to British rule in the Middle East.

Seven days after Rommel landed, another man arrived in North Africa via a circuitous route from Italy. Had the British force been able to roll on to Tripoli, he would likely have been of little importance. But once the Desert Fox turned North Africa into a serious battlefront, the man, to whom the British gave codenames such as Lambert, Mr. Rose, and ultimately Cheese, became very important indeed. The Germans believed he was their loyal spy in Cairo. He was, in fact, working for British intelligence, and thus a double agent. It was, of course, extremely useful to have an enemy agent under control, and the British put him to work extensively in 1941 and 1942. It would be more valuable, though, to have a network of double agents, to step in should Cheese lose his credibility, and also to better control the breadth of German intelligence gathering in the region. During 1941–2, however, and despite occasional flashes of promise, there were no other double agents of consequence to supplement the work of Cheese in the struggle against Rommel’s Afrikakorps.

Simultaneously, in Britain, a separate group of double agents emerged, a network which was established before Cheese emerged in early 1941. By that time, intelligence officials in London had amassed a roster of double agents who were building careers as alleged spies in the service of Germany. The two loci of double-cross were entirely separate developments: beginning independently, each made its initial strides in ignorance of the other. They also developed at different speeds, with a full ‘system’ of double agents in place in Britain by 1942, and a comparable level of development achieved in Cairo in early 1943. The double agents in London and in Cairo also existed in radically different operational environments, and consequently the systems were developed for different primary purposes. Britain was, except from the air, militarily isolated, whereas the Middle East and North Africa were the heart of Britain’s land war in 1941–2. Thus, any double agent in the region was swept up into military events, whereas the British agents had time to season and develop their profiles before being launched in earnest to deceive the enemy. What would become the Mediterranean double-cross system emerged in a desperate time for Britain, on a front in which they had chosen to stake their entire war strategy.⁶ Moreover, they had to fight the German enemy when that army was at the peak of its operational strength, and before the British had reached theirs. The Mediterranean system was thus, in its infancy, buffeted by the forces of war more severely than its British equivalent.

Although these difference persisted, they were tempered by exchanges of officers between London and Cairo, and each developed some influence over the other. Even so, it was not inevitable that Cairo would create a double-agent system analogous to that in Britain: Cairo had far fewer cases, and the local military situation encouraged short-term thinking, meaning that agents could be blown to support an important offensive or defensive operation. So, while local developments based around Cheese were the core of what could turn into a Cairo-based double-cross system, it was the influence of London that ensured a system was a possible during the slow and halting period of construction which began in 1941 and continued to 1943. It is thus impossible to understand either double-cross system without unraveling and analyzing the complex relationship between the metropolitan and colonial intelligence. They did share common important features. Each played agents back against the Abwehr, the espionage agency of the German High Command. Each also, eventually, had access to high-level German signals decrypts, known as Ultra. And each began with a single, experimental agent, which acted as a test case in double-agent technique, an ancient method of espionage which Britain took to new heights during the Second World War.

The UK network grew from a single seed, planted before the war by MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service. The person in question, codenamed Snow, was Arthur Owens, a Welsh electrical engineer who frequently visited German shipyards on business. He worked part-time for MI6 beginning in 1936, although MI5, Britain’s domestic Security Service, soon became aware that he was also in contact with the Abwehr. The Germans were attracted to Owens because of his firm’s contracts with the British Admiralty.⁷ Owens, when confronted, agreed to remain in contact with the Abwehr while working loyally for the British, thus becoming a double agent. His career took off: despite British fears to the contrary during the spy hysteria of 1939–40, the Abwehr had virtually no network in place in Britain and, given that Owens had already lied to them and claimed to have a series of sub-agents, the Abwehr named him their lead agent in Britain. To get his information in a timelier manner – and in preparation for the impending war which could render Owens unable to travel to the continent freely – the Abwehr provided him with a radio transmitter and receiver in early 1939, a fact he did not immediately disclose to MI5 or MI6. Upon the outbreak of war, Owens, whom MI5 never fully trusted, was detained, at which time he revealed his radio and offered to operate it under British direction. MI5 agreed and, as the case was now based firmly in Britain, Snow came under their full control. Even so, Owens made visits to his Abwehr controller in the still-neutral Low Countries.⁸

His contacts with the Germans yielded valuable information to MI5 at a time when their knowledge of enemy intelligence was minimal and prone to panicked exaggeration. Until the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS) made more headway into reading enciphered Abwehr radio communications, intelligence from Snow was essential in providing current data on Abwehr personalities, organization, and activities. He also provided, beyond contextual information, material aid in the battle against German espionage. In October 1939, based on contacts given personally by Snow’s Abwehr controller, MI5 tracked down and detained what turned out to be the last two German spies at large in Britain, one of whom agreed to become a double agent, codenamed Charlie.⁹ That same October journey to the continent also furnished the British with a code for Snow’s radio transmissions, a clue which allowed codebreakers to begin work on the Abwehr hand cipher, a process which showed its first success in April 1940.¹⁰ The agent also provided invaluable help in late 1940 when the Abwehr sent waves of spies to Britain in preparation for the planned German invasion. Twenty-five agents landed in Britain between September and November 1940, all of whom were rounded up, furnishing four further double-agent cases. Importantly, many of these spies were positively identified as such by the information on their forged identity cards, details which had been provided earlier in the year by Snow at the Abwehr’s request.¹¹

In these early months Owens was perhaps the most valuable asset in the service of British intelligence, showing the versatility of a well-run double agent. The link to the Abwehr which he provided was essential during the period when no signals intelligence was available, a blackout which ended only gradually. Although the first break into the Abwehr hand cipher did come in spring 1940, the full break did not occur until December of that year. GCCS did not break the Abwehr machine cipher, created by their variant of the Enigma machine, until December 1941, more than two years after the start of the war. Even when British codebreaking efforts, based at GCCS headquarters at Bletchley Park, developed to the extent that they fundamentally altered the nature of the war, the human double agents in Britain were not suddenly made redundant by the genius of codebreakers such as Gordon Welchman and Alan Turing. Instead, the agents were welded into a single system which, when complemented with Bletchley’s signals output, was a unique and potent development in the history of espionage and warfare.

During 1940 the potential of the nascent network of British double agents was apparent, but in these early days the officers of MI5 were inexperienced and unsure of when and how the spies should be deployed. Moreover, what they attempted in 1940 was not innovative. The mere fact that double agents existed, even in large numbers, was not peculiar. They are an ancient tool of espionage, and MI5 had used them in rudimentary fashion during the First World War, although not without struggles with higher authorities. In October 1914 MI5 asked for a spy named Carl Lody to be tried in camera, so that they could send false information in his name to his German contact. However, the trial was held in public at the insistence of the government, which had public relations purposes in mind. The Security Service managed to do slightly better with spy Karl Müller, sending false reports in his name from February 1915 to a cover address in Antwerp, until the lifting of a press embargo on his trial in June. The preference for public trials was the main stumbling block on the path to more elaborate double-agent operations, as were the lack of multiple cases and lack of signals intelligence to inform their use. The only truly successful case was an American in the Netherlands named Como, who passed MI5-approved material to German spymasters. The case failed to develop fully, however, because the War Office would not provide the sensitive material the Germans demanded their spy collect.¹² In any case, these efforts were meant primarily to trick the opposing intelligence service rather than to sway military and political decision-makers – although John Ferris, using the private papers of Director of Naval Intelligence Admiral Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, has shown that controlled agents were used to cover troop movements and to pose phoney amphibious landings to scare the Germans, with unknown and possibly no effect.¹³

British experience was therefore stunted by officialdom, and other intelligence services took the art of double-cross much further during the inter-war years. The Soviets and the French were the real experts, and Paul Paillole, head of the French military’s German counter-intelligence branch, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and glossary
• Codenames of military operations and deception plans
• A note on references and sources
• Introduction
• 1. Double-agent operations from the outbreak of war to November 1942
• 2. The development of the Mediterranean double-cross system
• 3. Strategic deception and the 1943 Mediterranean campaign
• 4. Security and counter-intelligence, 1942–45
• 5. Counter-sabotage in Gibraltar, 1940–44
• 6. Operational and strategic deceptions in Italy, 1944–45
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index