Churchill's Wizards (40 page)

Gustav Siegfried Eins
came on air on the eve of Delmer's thirty-seventh birthday. A fortnight earlier, there had been a bizarre episode when Hitler's beetle-browed Deputy Führer and right-hand man, Rudolf Hess, was captured after parachuting into Scotland to try and talk peace to the unwitting Duke of Hamilton. Naturally, Hess's defection became the subject of
Gustav Siegfried
Eins's
first seven-minute broadcast. In it, the ranting character known as
der Chef
, ‘the Chief' or ‘the Boss' (Hitler's nickname on the election tour that Delmer covered), loudly denied the rumour that Hitler could have had anything to do with Hess's mission to England, thus covertly spreading it. There were nearly 700 more of these short broadcasts before the station's life ended dramatically with the burst of gunfire that cut off the speaker on 18 November 1943. The idea was to make people think that the Gestapo had finally caught up with
der Chef
. Actually, of course, it was another deception in the British ‘black' operation.

If ‘black' broadcasting is ‘pretence' broadcasting, then the principal speaker must be totally convincing.
Der Chef
fitted the bill. The man had to sound like a right-wing, patriotic German, probably a tough but frugal Prussian landowner, a
Junker
on his uppers, outraged by the ostentatious corruption and incompetence of scheming perverts and bigwigs in the Nazi and SS hierarchy who were profiting at home from the sacrifices of the decent and honourable Wehrmacht abroad.
Der
Chef
used vigorous and obscene soldier's language to castigate his many enemies. In his very first talk, the British Prime Minister was called ‘that flat-footed bastard of a drunken old Jew Churchill', which all added to the effect of a genuine German speaking his mind.

‘Black' radio worked precisely because it did not sound authorised. A bored German radio operator, more likely to be military than
civilian because more soldiers had short-wave receivers, might be scrolling through the dial one night when he chances to pick up a German voice speaking the salty language of the barracks. Delmer had learned from hearing genuine ships' captains talking to each other, and the ‘black' radio listening experience was intended to feel, Delmer said, like ‘eavesdropping on the private wireless of a secret organisation …' If some of what
der Chef
said rang bells with the listener or if he found the dirty stories funny, he probably kept listening and told his mates about what he heard. In this way, slowly, by word of mouth, the reputation of
Gustav Siegfried Eins
spread.

Sefton Delmer concocted
der Chef
from the angry, barking military types he had known in Berlin before the war, and was able to write his scripts because he was an excellent mimic with a real grip on the language. But to bring the man to life before the microphone he needed the right voice, and found it in Peter Seckelmann, a former Berlin journalist and writer of detective stories who had been living in Britain since 1937, who had volunteered for the British army and ended up a corporal in a Pioneer Corps bomb-disposal unit. After vetting by MI5, Seckelmann came to live with Delmer and his wife at their house, the Rookery, in the village of Aspley Guise near Bletchley. Delmer also found a German journalist, Johannes Reinholz, to play Seckelmann's arrogant, strutting, heel-clicking adjutant.

Sex is always a good way to grab attention. The tabloid newspaper trick of deploring vice while describing it in extensive detail also worked to glue listeners to the radio. There was much interesting material to be found in the works of the German sexologist and advocate of gay rights, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, ‘the Einstein of sex', but the pornographic descriptions that
der Chef
gave in his diatribes against the corrupt elite caused Delmer some trouble. Crossman's ‘revolutionary' broadcasters, jealous of Delmer's success, shopped him by making a lurid translation of one of
der
Chef
's racier talks about a voyeuristic German admiral at an orgy. When the script reached the left-wing puritan lawyer Sir Stafford Cripps, he sent a handwritten letter to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, on 12 June 1942, objecting ‘most strongly to such filth being allowed to go out of this country'. According to Delmer, Cripps also said to Eden in person, ‘If this is the sort of thing needed to win the war, I'd rather lose it!'

Robert Bruce Lockhart, the director general of the PWE from
March 1942, had to defend Delmer and placate Cripps over lunch by explaining why the depraved German admiral had been targeted: his failures in ensuring supplies to U-boats had already made him unpopular, so whipping up more indignation against the admiral helped to sow dissension among enemy submariners. Delmer wrote, ‘We are of course not trying to win Germans to our side by this method; we are trying to turn Germans against Germans and to weaken the German war-machine.' He also justified the violent imagery and excessive language of
der Chef
, deftly finessing the argument into a claim of British moral superiority: ‘There is a sadism in the German nature quite alien to the British nature and German listeners are very far from being revolted by the sadistic nature of some of these broadcasts.'

Delmer and his small team on GS1 soon discovered that invention could take you only so far. Rumour and falsehood were best grounded in genuine intelligence. Churchill was to say to Stalin, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,' but Sefton Delmer and Dudley Clarke came to realise that deception work turned that maxim inside out. The big lie was so valuable that it needed a bodyguard of truth. When Max Braun, formerly interned as an ‘enemy alien' on the Isle of Man, joined the team, he began a huge card index to log personal details of all Nazi Party functionaries and prominent Germans, combing through local German newspapers for authentic stories and genuine background detail to underpin British fantasy and misinformation. For example, Delmer turned a newspaper story about the successes of the German blood-transfusion service on its head by suggesting that the donors had not been tested for venereal disease, so wounded German soldiers might contract syphilis from the plasma.

Delmer gathered intelligence from many sources, including Foreign Office dispatches and SIS reports. The transcripts of ‘bugged' conversations between German prisoners of war, derived from the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), yielded new German technical slang, jokes, rumours, dirt, and insights into everyday German worries. Through the offices of Leonard Ingrams, Delmer was able to get hold of personal letters sent by people inside Germany to family and friends in neutral North, Central and South America. The mail was intercepted by postal censorship in Liverpool,
steamed open and copied before being sent on. Gossipy details could be used, altered and inflated to flesh out pointed remarks on air about the inequalities of German wartime conditions, so German listeners heard how the privileged were supposedly gorging themselves on ‘Diplomat Rations' and moving safely away from bombing zones.

Delmer found it easy to charm things out of people. In a lecture on Psychological Warfare that Sir Hugh Greene gave to the NATO Defence College in Paris just before he became director general of the BBC, he noted the appeal of Delmer's kind of work:

People trusted Delmer with secrets because he never used intelligence ‘raw', but always cooked it so as not to betray its source. The first people to discover this and feed Delmer information were Britain's Naval Intelligence Division, followed by Air Ministry Intelligence, with the War Office last. When Ian Fleming introduced Delmer to his boss in Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, Godfrey had straight away grasped what radio could do and set up a new propaganda section called NID 17 Z, under the former
Times
journalist Donald McLachlan, liaising with Fleming.

Just before Christmas 1942, over a champagne lunch, McLachlan talked to Delmer about the long-drawn-out Battle of the Atlantic. One reason to celebrate was that – at last – the decrypt drought was over. From February to November 1942, British Naval Intelligence had not been able to read one single message sent to the U-boats from their command and control centre, the
Befehlshaber
der
Unterseeboote
(BdU), or any of their replies, because the Germans were using the four-wheel Enigma key, not the three-wheel they had earlier. But on 13 December 1942 the ‘Shark' key was cracked and from then on all traffic could be read. The astonishing thing is that German naval intelligence had no idea that their communications were so vulnerable. Most U-boats did not leave harbour with their operational orders, but received them, by radio, at sea; and if the British and Americans could
read those instructions, so much the better for them. The Admiralty were keen to step up psychological warfare on the people who were manning them. They proposed that Delmer launch a new, live, shortwave station specially beamed at German submarine crews, featuring a demoralising ‘black' news bulletin. This excited Delmer. His previous attempt to do ‘black' news with a station called
Wehrmacht-
sender Nord
had failed because the broadcasts always had to be pre-recorded and so lost the cutting edge news needed. Delmer was convinced he had the best way of broadcasting live news every night: he could unleash the most powerful transmitter in the world.

To gain advantage in the wireless wars, Churchill had approved the purchase in May 1941 of a giant new radio transmitter from the USA. The Nazi conquest of Europe meant that the Germans had many more transmitters than Britain, some of which were being used to jam UK stations. The 500 kilowatt medium-wave transmitter, which Gambier-Parry called a ‘raiding Dreadnought of the Ether', was monstrously powerful and adapted to broadcast on different frequencies, between which it could switch almost instantaneously. (It was nicknamed ‘Aspidistra' for its size, after the Gracie Fields song, ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World'.) Aspidistra was originally destined for the American station WJZ, but the Federal Communications Commission refused it a licence because it massively exceeded the 50 kW limit for commercial radio stations. Section VIII of the British Secret Service managed to get in its bid for the transmitter before the Chinese government did, paying around
£
165,000 in all.

Aspidistra was initially supposed to fill an old gravel pit in Bedfordshire, but Section VIII's Chief Engineer, Harold Robin, insisted it should be positioned nearer Europe. Eventually somewhere was found near Crowborough in Sussex, the highest spot in the 6,400-acre Ashdown Forest, the largest area of open moorland in the south-east of England. A battalion of Canadian engineers with road-building equipment helped excavate a hole 50 feet deep, and 600 men worked by day and by night in the summer of 1942 to erect the reinforced concrete shell. Robin also supervised the installation of a 3,000-horsepower diesel generator, a cooling tower, workshops and offices. Aspidistra made its first broadcast early in November 1942, supporting operation torch, the landings in North Africa. Its output was shared between PWE, the BBC and the RAF.

Aspidistra's power and reach were extraordinary. On 17 November 1943, for example, during an RAF bombing raid on Ludwigshafen, an RAF linguist transmitting via Aspidistra counterfeited the voice of the controller of the German nightfighters, warning them all to land because of the dangers of fog. According to Professor R. V. Jones, when the Germans found out, they employed women controllers. So the RAF found German-speaking WAAFs; and when the Germans used a man and a woman for all orders, the British did likewise. Eventually, the Germans had to supplement verbal orders with music: a waltz meant Munich, jazz Berlin.

Delmer called his new live station
Deutsche
Kurzwellensender
Atlantik
(German short-wave Radio Atlantic), and it was later familiarly known as
Atlantiksender
. His team moved into a fenced and guarded five-acre compound at Milton Bryan in Buckinghamshire, and got ready to start transmissions in March 1943. It was a strange community that Delmer ran, some of whose members were still enemy prisoners of war. His close assistants included Tom Stevens, the classicist who had been in the ‘V' campaign and who had an ingenious, detective-puzzling mind. As Hugh Greene noted, the best psychological warriors were often journalists or university dons.

Delmer envisaged
Atlantiksender
as a really entertaining programme that would lure people into listening with lots of dance music; as chief disc jockey he used Alexander Maass, whom he had known in Berlin and met again in Madrid. They got the latest records of German dance music flown over by fast Mosquito plane from Stockholm, and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the American SOE) helped them obtain new American music. Marlene Dietrich was even persuaded to sing in German for what she was told was a special Voice of America broadcast to Germany.
Atlantiksender
's German in-house band, led by Henry Zeisel, had been captured by the British Eighth Army when they were touring to entertain Rommel's
Afrika
Korps
. Delmer dug other helpers out of PoW camps, finding anti-Nazis or deserters from the German forces, looking particularly for naval men who were up to date on technical terms, correct procedures, and the authentic argot and complaints of the petty officers' messes and the lower decks. Frank Lyndner, a former bookseller who thought Delmer was ‘a god', kept the filing system on the German Navy, logging personal details culled from letters to and from captured U-boat crew-
members in PoW camps in Britain and Canada, and sifting German local newspapers, just as Max Braun had for Delmer's earlier station GS1, but this time for dates of births, marriages, deaths, transfers, promotions, awarding of medals, etc., in order to send personalised congratulations over the air.