Kim Philby by Tim Milne Read Free Book Online Page A

and try to make sense ofthe dozens of different German operations and activities that were going on simultaneously; identify the large cast of characters, mostly referred to only by cover-names; pursue enquiries abroad with a stream of telegrams and letters to our stations in the peninsula, in Tangier and sometimes elsewhere; keep in close touch with other departments concerned, particularly MI5 over anything that involved or might involve British territory; and gradually build up an order of battle of the many German intelligence stations and sections in the area. The work involved study not only of the ISOS but also of voluminous reports from the stations, interrogation reports from MI5, back files in the SIS registry and much besides. For the first fifteen months or so I had no assistant. Kim followed the material as well as he could, but one could not learn much from merely skimming through it. The most important message of the day might be something like ‘Your 129. Yes.’ Who sent a message and to whom was often more important than the message itself, and could be a valuable indication of the nature of a German intelligence operation, or even of vital changes in Abwehr or SD structure and hierarchy.
Most of the messages did not make much sense by themselves. This had its advantages. The chief had a tiresome assistant who was supposed to run through the material for anything that ought to be brought to the attention of his master. Before long he was reduced to ringing me only when something like a titled name caught his eye. Otherwise he left me in peace.
The very heart of the whole problem was to marry up ISOS with what was called ground information, i.e. reports from our stations abroad and other non-cryptographic information. ISOS, purely by itself, was of little practical use. It could tell you a good deal about headquarters organisation, chains of command andcommunication, levels of activity, and, within limits, intelligence operations; and it was very useful towards the end of the war for the picture it gave of the collapse of the politically unreliable Abwehr command and its takeover by the SD. But by itself it did not usually tell you the real names of Abwehr officers and agents, and was liable to give a very incomplete or misleading impression of what was going on. It was also easy, particularly in the early stages, to misinterpret the material. Kim relates in his book the story of the ‘ORKI companions’, a fabulous nonsense which was in progress when I arrived. The story has, I think, more significance than has previously been realised, but it would interrupt the narrative unduly to go into all the details, which are given in a footnote to this chapter.
An important part of the business was identification of those appearing in ISOS under cover-names. Often it was simple. A message would say, perhaps, that HERMANO was flying from Madrid to Barcelona or Berlin on such-and-such a date. Our stations could normally supply passenger manifests for Lufthansa or Iberia airlines as a matter of course. When the appropriate list came in, usually with surnames only and often misspelt, you scanned it for likely names. Perhaps the list for that day would be missing, or incomplete, or HERMANO might have decided instead to go by train or car. But with luck there would be one or two likely candidates on the list. Unless there was urgent need, you then waited for another announced journey, or it might be a hotel booking, for with the larger hotels we could usually get hold of the nightly guest lists. If one of the likely names appeared again, and if (as usually happened) you had other ground information on him, the identification was probably safe.
Sometimes the situation was much more urgent, and thestation had to be brought in to make investigations within the limits imposed by the overriding need not to compromise the ISOS source. One of the first such cases, in early 1942, concerned an agent with the cover-name pascal, of