Horse Under Water (24 page)

I took all the material down to Kevin Cassel in his Central Register last Tuesday. He signed and embossed the official receipt and wished me merry Christmas.

‘Well over the fast,’ I said. Why was he always smiling?

As I drove back through Ripley an old lady was sticking tufts of cotton wool into her shop-window to spell ‘Merry Xmas’. Outside a man was using a shovel to clear a path to the door.

‘Now you see what it’s like where the work is done,’ said Dawlish, and went on to make provocative remarks about lying around in the sun. Dawlish had convened the training structure sub-committee on my behalf. It was a master-stroke in his battle with O’Brien for control of the Strutton Committee. Dawlish had put every member of the Strutton Committee on the training structure subcommittee with the exception of O’Brien. In other words it was like holding meetings with
O’Brien locked out. Dawlish was all knees and elbows. He sat in his battered leather armchair and puffed clouds of smoke at the Duke of Wellington, and said that being successful was just a state of mind.

Bernhard had spread himself all over my office but had taken care not to do any of my paper work. The thirteen-centimetre lens for the Nikon had apricot jam on it, and my secretary was doing half the typing in the building. I kicked Bernhard and his twenty cardboard folders out, and although he protested volubly he set up shop elsewhere. ‘And I owe you a two-pound bag of sugar,’ he said as he left.

‘Stealing sugar is a felony,’ I grumbled. ‘Didn’t you learn any manners at Cambridge?’

‘The only thing I learned at Cambridge,’ said Bernhard, ‘was how to put on a pair of fifteen-inch trousers without first removing my chukka boots.’

Alice brought me some sugar.

On Friday I took Charly Christmas shopping in the West End. She bought her father a subscription to
Playboy
and I sent Baix an Eton tie. I suppose we were each in our own way fighting the establishment. She tried to make some joke at my expense about the ice-melting theories that I had believed; but I didn’t respond.

‘Your old man
is
an admiral, isn’t he?’ I asked.

‘Yes, dream man.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want to speak to him about that diving equipment. Lisbon have lost part of it. It’s on my charge, you see. They want me to pay £250 towards it.’

‘Come back to my place,’ she said, ‘I’ll see what can be done.’

‘You’ll help?’ I said.

‘Console,’ she said, ‘console.’

1.
Telephone-tapping

‘When you talk into a telephone, you shout from the roof,’ Ivor Butcher said one day. A tremendous number of phone calls are tapped in the U.K. In the U.S. wiretapping is an industry.

1.
To tap
(
in comfort
) get someone in the G.P.O. to alter wires on the frame so that your ‘victim’s’ phone rings yours as well as the number he is calling. All you do is listen in or record. N.B. If you want to know what number he has dialled you will need a Dial Recorder to count the digits.

2.
To tap
. Take your ‘tappers’ (box, hand-set and crocodile clips) to the B.T. (box terminal), ‘taste’ the terminals with a wet finger to get the one you want. Note: a friend inside the G.P.O. who can tell you about the ‘pairs’ and how far from the ‘victim’s’ phone they can be picked up will make life a little easier.

3.
To tap one call only
. You can brazenly do it from an outdoor green cabinet, but study the dress characteristics of G.P.O. engineers first.

4.
Are you tapped?
Do you get cut off in mid-conversation more often when using one particular phone? (N.B. Don’t be misled by old-fashioned inefficiency, all G.P.O. phones are subject to that.) Do you sometimes find that the clarity and amplification increase after a minute or so? This is all due to the eavesdropper carelessly replacing the handset. Moral: Don’t say anything confidential over a phone, but if you really must, discuss trivia for two or three minutes in the hope that the eavesdropper will hang up.

2.
Austin Butterworth (Ossie)

In November 1938, D.S.T., which is the French M.I.5, wanted to open an English make of safe in a certain embassy in Paris. Special Branch brought Ossie out of Parkhurst and asked him to go there.

‘With the Nicks to help you,’ said Ossie incredulously, and volunteered like a shot. He got on all right with D.S.T. and they kept him for nearly four months. Ossie’s value to them came from his knowledge of British safes, which several of the embassies in Paris then had. Now of course any embassy in its right mind uses only safes made in its own country. However, back before the war
Ossie earned himself a quite nice French civil medal, but some bureaucrat in the Home Office prevented its award.

Ossie has always been a very thorough worker, and often he would take a London office and register a firm at Bush House in order to write and inquire about the sort of safe he intended to crack. Once or twice he even bought and installed the same model to practise on. Perhaps this isn’t so extraordinary these days, but in the thirties it was really scientific crime.

It was in April 1939 that D.S.T. borrowed Ossie again. This time, without telling London what they intended (and very wise, too, for the Home Office would have gone out of their small minds), they sent Ossie to live in Berlin. Big expense account and an apartment in a beautiful block of flats in the Bayerischer Platz. All Ossie had to do was to study the literature of the safe manufacturers. Sometimes they would go to one of the showrooms to look at the real thing. When war began, Paris and London were fighting over Ossie and he spent the war years travelling around the world cracking safes for various Allied Intelligence organizations. All this experience meant that Ossie had made many important friends ‘across the grain’, as they say in Intelligence work; that is to say, he was a link between many separate organizations.

In the normal way of operations, such people disappear when their usefulness is past. Ossie’s
influence was now great, and because of his friends he survived those fatal years for agents, 1945–8. Ossie had been back in prison several times since the war, even though the F.O. generally sent some tame V.C. along to the court to speak about his war record in what was ironically described as ‘the Resistance’. In the post-war world of Intelligence Ossie had become a specialist on documents. Common crime was no longer for him; he got secret documents out of safes. The document business was booming. He would ‘do’ an aeroplane factory for the Yugoslav Embassy or the Yugoslav Embassy for an aeroplane factory. Ossie didn’t play favourites among clients. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ he once told me. By now Ossie could read enough of a dozen languages to ensure that he wouldn’t bring the wrong documents back. He had also studied photography at L.C.C. evening classes.

3.
Operation Bernhard

The idea of producing counterfeit banknotes (£5, £10, £20, £50) in order to shake confidence in British currency is said to have been inspired by the dropping of forged clothing-and food-coupons by the R.A.F. over Nazi Germany. The original plan (to drop the notes from Luftwaffe aircraft) was named Operation Andreas but later was replaced by Operation Bernhard. This latter plan was to use the money to finance secret operations.

The notes produced at Oranienburg Concentration Camp (Special Wing 19) were used to:

1. Buy arms from Balkan partisans (so making them less dangerous).
   
2. Finance Hungarian radio-listening service.
   
3. Buy information concerning Mussolini’s whereabouts (in order to arrange rescue).
   
4. Pay Cicero (£300,000).
   
5. Supply presents for Arab sheiks.
   

In the latter stages of the war the production centre was moved to Ebensee and to an underground factory near the village of Redl-Zipf (between Salzburg and Linz). A young S.S. lieutenant moving a consignment of the currency (and some people say the plates too) is in a difficult position when one of the lorries breaks down. Acting on orders, he tips the packing cases into the River Traun and hands the broken lorry over to the Wehrmacht. After a little distance a second lorry breaks down; it is abandoned.

When British currency comes floating down the Traun to the Traunsee Lake the U.S. Army, who are by now in occupation, investigate the second lorry. In it they find £21 million in virtually perfect forgeries. It is accepted that the remaining lorries went to the German Naval Research Station (homing torpedoes were tested in the lake).

The sides of the lake are steep, and investigation of it rendered dangerous by a raft of waterlogged
timber that hangs suspended about 100 feet below the surface of the water. Divers do not dare to go under it.

In March 1946 two bodies are found near by. Both men had been stationed at the Naval Research Station. In August 1950, another death: again an ex-member of the Naval Research Station.

Many people thought that the sites of these deaths indicated that the plates were hidden in the heights above the station rather than in the water. Rumours said that the Russians organized these attempts, but there is nothing to connect them with either.

In 1953 the
Reader’s Digest
financed an investigation, and in 1959 a German magazine financed another and claims to have found plates, notes and secret records in a near-by lake. The material was placed in such a way that it could be recovered. There have since been several more.

Operation Bernhard was run by the S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst), the S.S. Security and Intelligence Unit which evoked much jealousy among the other Nazi intelligence units for its extravagant access to so much finance.

4.
Olterra

The
Olterra
was a 4,900-ton Italian tanker which sank (although leaving its superstructure above the water-line) in Algeciras Bay at the
beginning of World War 2. The Italian Government offered to raise it and sell it to the Spanish Government. The price was very reasonable. The Italian salvage men cut a door in the hull below water level. It then became a secret harbour for the tiny human torpedoes (called by the Italians
Maiale –
pigs) which had arrived dismantled among the new tubes and boilers for the
Olterra.
Gibraltar harbour was just across the bay.

5.
Kurier

Invented by German Navy during World War 2. The original device enabled a semi-skilled operator to send high-speed signals (these could be read and decoded only by means of recording gear, it was far too fast for a human ear to interpret). The dials are set to
arrange
the signal, then the cylinder is attached to the transmitter and the crank turned to
send
a signal. During the war the messages were photo-recorded at Neumünster (Holstein). The R.N. were most anxious to acquire one. After the war this improved version was designed.

6.
Lt Peterson, B.T., Court martial

The front page said ‘Court Martial’ and then a list of contents. First the report of the Court of Inquiry that had repatriated this officer from
Germany. Under that was the Circumstantial Letter (a report about the need for a court martial). Then there was a list of witnesses, warrant for holding the court, statements by the accused, and a batch of pencilled shorthand originals.

‘Traitorously holding correspondence with the enemy (Germany) … having traitorously given intelligence to the enemy … traitorously given information to the enemy.’ The difference between those was too subtle for me. I read on, ‘having been made a prisoner of war he voluntarily aided the enemy by joining and working for an organization controlled by the enemy and known as the British Free Corps … failing to report his arrest to the C.O. of the establishment where he was born for pay as directed by Naval Pay Regulations Article 1085.’

The white spaces in the dossier had diagonal blue ink-lines across them to prevent insertions. As I read on, the scene came alive. The first winter after the war, the assembly hall with its kitchen tables covered with naval blankets, the senior officers in their shiny buttons, the accused in a newly issued uniform; Bernard Thomas Peterson, a volunteer reserve officer captured by the Germans during ‘human torpedo’ attacks on the Norwegian coast in 1943. The prosecution called as first witness Lt James who, as a member of the S.I.B. (Special Investigation Branch) attached to 30 Corps, arrested Peterson in Hanover on 8 May (V.E. Day). Lt James said that an order issued by the Montgomery H.Q. on 6 May
made the use of German transport illegal. Acting on information received by phone, Lt James and two S.I.B. sergeants went to an address in suburban Hanover and there found Peterson. On his person Peterson had a
Reisepass
and a
Wehrpass
in the name of Herbert Pütz, and 200 R.M. These were produced in the court. In suitcases in the room where Peterson was found were another 19,568 R.M., a sable coat, and a 9-mm. MP18 Bergmann automatic machine-gun with ammunition. Lt James said that these could be made available to the court. The Judge-advocate, after consulting with the President of the Court, said that they would not be required but should be held available.

After the arresting officer discovered a blood-group number tattooed under his arm, Peterson was put under close arrest as a suspected member of an illegal organization: the S.S.

The S.I.B. went on, ‘In the garage adjoining was found a Mercedes staff car with WM (Wehrmacht-Marine) registration. There were 108 litres of petrol in the garage and car. The car (which was the object of the visit) was handed over to the German Command Organization under Field-Marshal Busch in Schleswig-Holstein.’ It also could be made available to the court. Lt James, in answer to a question, said that Peterson’s only comment on being placed under close arrest as a member of the S.S. was that ‘the battle started in Seville in 1936 and it’s not yet over’, or words to that effect. Lt James said that in spite of Peterson’s excellent English he did
not suspect him of being anything other than a member of the German Armed Forces. He had encountered many German soldiers who had lived and worked in England and as a consequence spoke good English.

I turned the discoloured pages of the dossier. Peterson after capture by the Germans had been approached by two members of the ‘Legion of St George’ (later renamed the ‘Britische Freikorps’). Its members were mostly English or Irishmen who had been in the British Union of Fascists before the war. Many of them had what are now described as personality disorders, and all were of the opinion that England would soon see sense and join a German-occupied Europe on a ‘crusade’ against Russia. The verbatim record said:

The defence requested permission to offer as evidence the details of Peterson’s task in the Norwegian operation but this was denied. He admitted joining the Britische Freikorps and going to their training unit at Hildesheim. The transcription said: