Kim Philby by Tim Milne Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tim Milne
whom we knew little except that he had stayed at a small hotel in the Barcelona area on or around a particular date, and was being sent, at any rate in the first instance, to South America. The hotel was not one we had regular tabs on. Then came an ISOS message saying that the Abwehr had bought a ticket for PASCAL on the SS Marqués de Comillas, at a cost of (let us say) 14,875 pesetas. He was about to sail. Our Madrid station managed, first, to get guest lists for the obscure hotel, and secondly to pin the ticket cost down to one or other of six people. This was more difficult that it might sound, since there were apparently several options and extras contributing to the total ticket cost of each of the hundreds of passengers. One name appeared both on the hotel list and among the six passengers. Because of the need to exercise extreme discretion the enquiries had taken several days, and the boat was on the point of docking in Trinidad when the identification was made. We and MI5 sent Trinidad a Most Immediate signal, and poor pascal, who probably never even knew what his ticket had cost, was taken off the boat for interrogation. He was carrying compromising equipment and soon confessed. For the rest of the war he was interned in Britain. Several of his companions in internment were caught in the same kind of way.
Many identifications were difficult. Some of the characters never travelled, never moved outside the metaphysical ISOS world. It was a long time before we were able to put a name to felipe, of the Abwehr headquarters in Madrid, who was of particular interest because he specialised in sending agents toEngland. Cover-names of staff were often changed, so that you had to identify a cover-name with its successor before you could proceed. In addition, most of the more important Abwehr station officers were living under aliases in Spain or Portugal, and could not readily be identified with previous records from other countries. Some of our identifications would remain on the ‘tentative’ list for months before the final clincher arrived. Occasionally it was child’s play: for instance, a message from Seville to Madrid containing a cover-name might be passed on to Berlin with the real name substituted. In the course of two years or so several hundred German intelligence staff, agents and contacts in Spain, Portugal and north-west Africa, appearing under cover-names in ISOS, were finally identified with ‘real’ people.
But the agent-running activities of the Abwehr in the peninsula were less important and less damaging to Britain than their ship-watching activities in the Strait of Gibraltar, to which the Spanish authorities were not so much turning a blind eye as giving active if undeclared assistance. The Abwehr station at Algeciras reported all comings and goings in the port of Gibraltar, and together with the station at Tangier covered the passage of Allied naval units, convoys and other shipping through the strait. But Abwehr observation did not, at that time, extend to the hours of darkness. It was I think in February 1942, soon after the machine cypher had been cracked, that we saw the first cryptic ISOS message about ‘Bodden’. This enterprise appeared primarily to involve infrared searchlights, cameras and heat-sensing apparatus beamed across the Strait of Gibraltar between two German-manned posts on either side of the water; but radar equipment was also mentioned, and a ‘ Lichtsprechgerät ’ or ‘light speech apparatus’. (This last, if I understand it correctly,made use of a visible light ray, or more probably an infrared one, modulated to carry a voice transmission in the same way, very broadly, that a radio wave of more conventional frequency is modulated. It would be almost impossible to intercept, unless one could position oneself exactly in the line of the very narrow beam, and had some rather exotic equipment.) After ten or twenty ISOS messages had accumulated, bristling with German
Many identifications were difficult. Some of the characters never travelled, never moved outside the metaphysical ISOS world. It was a long time before we were able to put a name to felipe, of the Abwehr headquarters in Madrid, who was of particular interest because he specialised in sending agents toEngland. Cover-names of staff were often changed, so that you had to identify a cover-name with its successor before you could proceed. In addition, most of the more important Abwehr station officers were living under aliases in Spain or Portugal, and could not readily be identified with previous records from other countries. Some of our identifications would remain on the ‘tentative’ list for months before the final clincher arrived. Occasionally it was child’s play: for instance, a message from Seville to Madrid containing a cover-name might be passed on to Berlin with the real name substituted. In the course of two years or so several hundred German intelligence staff, agents and contacts in Spain, Portugal and north-west Africa, appearing under cover-names in ISOS, were finally identified with ‘real’ people.
But the agent-running activities of the Abwehr in the peninsula were less important and less damaging to Britain than their ship-watching activities in the Strait of Gibraltar, to which the Spanish authorities were not so much turning a blind eye as giving active if undeclared assistance. The Abwehr station at Algeciras reported all comings and goings in the port of Gibraltar, and together with the station at Tangier covered the passage of Allied naval units, convoys and other shipping through the strait. But Abwehr observation did not, at that time, extend to the hours of darkness. It was I think in February 1942, soon after the machine cypher had been cracked, that we saw the first cryptic ISOS message about ‘Bodden’. This enterprise appeared primarily to involve infrared searchlights, cameras and heat-sensing apparatus beamed across the Strait of Gibraltar between two German-manned posts on either side of the water; but radar equipment was also mentioned, and a ‘ Lichtsprechgerät ’ or ‘light speech apparatus’. (This last, if I understand it correctly,made use of a visible light ray, or more probably an infrared one, modulated to carry a voice transmission in the same way, very broadly, that a radio wave of more conventional frequency is modulated. It would be almost impossible to intercept, unless one could position oneself exactly in the line of the very narrow beam, and had some rather exotic equipment.) After ten or twenty ISOS messages had accumulated, bristling with German