The Spy with 29 Names (2 page)

The attack has failed in only a few hours. Thousands have been killed. Thoughts of opening up a ‘second front’ are now almost as dead as the men on the shore, staining the seawater red. Pieces of body lie everywhere – feet with boots still on them; men stuck to barbed wire, burning where the bombs in their packs have exploded. The Germans are giving the seriously wounded
coups de grâce
to the back of the head.

As Jack climbs a ladder away from the beach and into captivity, an English-speaking German officer smirks and asks, ‘What took you so long? We have been waiting for you for ten days.’

They knew they were coming all the time.

The Royals walk away from the battle, their hands held above their heads, while German photographers take snaps of the defeated enemy. This is great propaganda. The Germans can relax in the west now. Europe is theirs; they can concentrate on fighting the Russians.

Shattered yet defiant, the Allied soldiers start singing
La Marseillaise
as they march along. Their captors are furious. French civilians at the roadside start to weep and show the V for Victory sign.

For Jack there is nothing now except life in a prisoner-of-war camp. His role in the war – his Normandy – has come to an end. It will be years before he is free again.

Today, on 19 August 1942, almost 4,000 Canadian and British soldiers out of a total force of 6,000 have been killed, wounded or captured. The Dieppe Raid, as it is called, is a military disaster, an attack which the Germans themselves, with just over 300 dead, consider mediocre at best. Yet the lessons for the Allies are invaluable. Jack
does not know this, but already the seeds have been sown for a second Normandy, two years later in 1944. Not here, not in and around the port of Dieppe, but over 80 miles to the south-west, towards the Cherbourg peninsula – an assault which will draw heavily on what has happened to him and his comrades this morning, attempting to avoid the same mistakes.

Firstly, never attack a port – they are heavily defended, and the cost in human lives is too high.

Secondly, any assault must be carried out on a much more massive scale and with greater cooperation between air, land and sea forces.

And thirdly, unlike at Dieppe, the enemy must not know where or when you are going to attack. Surprise, that most crucial of weapons, must be protected and used.

Even then, there remains the doubt: would surprise alone be enough?

One last scene catches Jack’s attention as the defeated Allied soldiers are leaving the town. On the outskirts a woman approaches the column, walking alongside them for a few yards.

‘Insult me in French!’ she whispers to one of the men.

The soldier looks baffled, but something in the woman’s expression makes him wonder. At her bidding, he starts to cuss and swear aggressively, shaking his fist and shouting obscenities.

On cue, the French woman responds and starts pelting him and the other soldiers with tomatoes, launching them with a look of rage on her face.

It seems odd: the tomatoes are not hitting the soldiers hard; despite her shouting and harsh words, the woman is actually tossing them rather gently. The defeated men are at their lowest ebb, their spirits crushed, yet are quick to catch on. Scooping up the tomatoes, they hide them in their tunics for eating later, grateful for this act of camouflaged charity. It will be a long time before the Germans offer them anything to eat or drink.

The Germans, however, think the woman is genuinely upset, and find the scene immensely funny. They even pat her on the back, praising her for her spontaneous act against the
Englische Schweine
.

They never realise they have been deceived.

picaresque,
adj. of or relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero.

ORIGIN from Sp.
picaresco
, from
pícaro
‘rogue’.

pícaro
adj.
(a)
crafty, cunning, sly, wily
(b)
mischievous, naughty, crooked.

ALLIED DISASTERS IN
the Second World War were not limited to the Dieppe Raid. After the collapse at Dunkirk in 1940 and defeat in the Balkans in 1941, many doubted whether the British Army could prevail in a straight fight against the Wehrmacht. Even with the help of the United States, with its greater industrial strength and manpower committed from late 1941, it would be difficult to defeat a highly trained and fearsome opponent.

Other means – ‘special means’ – had to be developed to overcome the enemy. The Germans could pluck a seemingly endless supply of fighting men from a culture that valued discipline and glorified war. But the British applauded characteristics that would become effective weapons against them: wit and eccentricity. Intelligence, counter-intelligence and deception were to become vital for the Allied war effort. There was a need for thinking in extraordinary and different ways, for talented men and women to set their minds on how to surprise and fool the enemy. Something like Dieppe could never be allowed to happen again.

In this atmosphere, the craziest schemes could tip the balance in the Allies’ favour. And often such a scheme was the brainchild of a tiny group of people or an odd individual.

This is the story of one of those men and the decisive part that he played in the success of D-Day and the Normandy campaign. The tale has been told before, even by the man himself, but only partially:
gaps were left unfilled, veils drawn over uncomfortable facts. The character at the centre remained an enigma, his true personality rarely emerging.

He was a Spaniard, from Barcelona – a dreamer, a cheat and a liar, and yet the noblest and kindest of men; a compulsive storyteller who could barely tell a story, so purple was his prose. If he were not real, he might appear like a character from a picaresque novel – a saintly rogue and compelling fantasist with unorthodox ideas about truth, someone who defies simple labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’: at once innocent, like Don Quixote, and wily, like Sancho Panza.

He became the greatest double agent in history, creating a new truth by telling untruths. This is the story of who he was and what he did, and of some of the many lives that were changed by his achievements. The details and quoted conversations are taken from records, letters and memoirs of those who knew him.

At home, in Spain, he was known as Juan.

In the secret worlds in which he moved, he went under many different names . . .

The ‘Cottages’ were a line of three small adjacent buildings near the main house. They had served as the head coachman’s quarters before the war, but now housed Dillwyn Knox’s team of code-breakers – mostly pretty young women like Mavis Lever. People called them ‘Dilly’s Girls’.

Knox was one of Bletchley’s ‘characters’, eccentric intellectuals working at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), trying to crack encrypted German wireless messages. They were the lifeblood of the place.

A classicist from Cambridge, Knox was often likened to a character from a Lewis Carroll novel, long and lean and, as one friend put it, with a ‘face like a pang of hunger’. Now in his late fifties, he would sometimes wander around Bletchley in his dressing gown, not realising that he had not put his clothes on that morning, frequently losing his glasses or his tobacco tin under piles of decrypted messages. In one absent-minded moment he mistakenly stuffed bread from a sandwich into his pipe.

Mavis, still only nineteen at the time, felt a strong connection to Knox, seeing in him echoes of Alice’s White Knight: ‘endearingly eccentric and concerned about my welfare’.

‘We’re breaking machines,’ he had said to her the day she first arrived in the Cottages, in 1940. ‘Have you got a pencil?’

The respect and affection were mutual and the young recruit soon became the elder code-breaker’s protégée. Mavis had broken off her German studies at London University to get the job, and if Knox started quoting Milton’s
Lycidas
to her she would respond with something appropriate, perhaps from Heinrich Heine’s poetry. There was an affinity between them; years later she would write his biography.

Bletchley Park was like a small town by this point in the war, with thousands of people working intensely on the enemy’s codes, many of them in the huts that had been quickly assembled in the grounds. It got cold in winter. The Cottages were sturdier structures, better for keeping the heat in. Mavis was lucky.

The work was hard and there were rolling shifts throughout the day and night. A canteen was provided in the main house, but sometimes there was little more to eat at three in the morning than a handful of overcooked Brussels sprouts. There was a community spirit, however: when not code-breaking, Mavis enjoyed the concerts, the amateur dramatics group, and the Scottish country dancing.

Knox spent little time with them in the Cottage that December, he was seriously ill and was busy fighting a battle with Bletchley’s operational head Alistair Denniston over how their decoded material was handled within the intelligence services. Mavis’s work was built around Knox’s methods, however, and the thinking required for solving the puzzles created by the enemy’s Enigma machines.

‘Which way do the hands on a clock go round?’ he would ask.

‘Clockwise.’

‘That depends on whether you’re the clock or the observer.’

They had already enjoyed one great success together, breaking the Italian naval codes earlier in the year. This had played a vital role in the Battle of Matapan in the spring, when the Italian Navy suffered a major defeat at the hands of the British. Churchill described it as the greatest sea triumph since Trafalgar.

‘Tell Dilly we have had a great victory in the Mediterranean,’
Admiral Godfrey rang through to Bletchley. ‘And it’s entirely due to him and his girls.’

As a reward, Knox had taken Mavis out to dinner, driving in his Baby Austin to the Fountain Inn at nearby Stony Stratford, and arranged for her to get a raise on the 35 shillings a week she was then earning.

That was in April 1941. Now it was December, yet as Mavis and her colleague Margaret Rock worked to piece together a new puzzle, it was clear that something just as important – more so, even – was happening.

After months of effort, carrying on from Knox’s first hammer blow against the cipher in October, on 8 December Mavis and Margaret finally cracked the code used by German intelligence and were able to look at their first deciphered Abwehr message. If the Allies could listen in on what Germany’s spies were saying to each other, then the enemy would have few secrets left indeed.

Knox was delighted.

‘Give me a Lever and Rock,’ he said, ‘and I can move the universe’.

It was a great achievement, one which vindicated his unusual methods – using linguists and even a speech therapist to help him break ‘mathematical’ codes. Yet despite insisting that the credit be given to his ‘girls’, the ‘rodding’ system that they were using to break the German encryption was his making, and henceforth the decrypted messages would bear his name – even after, just over a year on, he died of lymph cancer.

Around them, the war carried on. The morning after her breakthrough, Mavis heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It seemed clear that the Americans would be joining them soon. Meanwhile, to the east, the Red Army was finally starting to push the Germans back from the outskirts of Moscow. It was not obvious at the time, but these events, taken in conjunction with her own success of the day before, meant that those few days in early December would prove to be a pivotal moment in the conflict.

After reading the first coded message, they had much more work to do. Mavis and Margaret were ‘in’, but it would take weeks before a proper stream of Abwehr messages could be produced. Out of a team of seventeen ‘girls’ they were the only ones with any German: more linguists would be needed. It was Christmas Day 1941 before this new, important source of information could be passed on to the
rest of British intelligence, a service which, at the beginning at least, involved decoding anything between fifty and a hundred Abwehr telegrams a day. Later that figure would be multiplied several times over and a total number of 140,000 messages were read by the end of the war.

Mavis was on her own that day – Knox was ill and had to stay at home, where Margaret was taking him material to carry on their work. There were no celebrations. All the same, it was a significant moment. ‘On Christmas Day 1941 the geniuses at Bletchley broke the Abwehr Enigma . . .’ Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote. ‘When that was done we really were in a new age.’

British intelligence officers could now read what their German opponents were saying to each other almost as easily as they read the morning newspapers. It was not Mavis’s job to analyse the messages that she and her colleagues cracked, however. That was the work of the intelligence officers at MI6 – of which GC&CS was a part – busy absorbing the material with which Mavis and Knox were now providing them.

In the German texts that they were reading, however, one curious name appeared, mentioned in the disturbing traffic between Abwehr headquarters at 76/78 Tirpitzufer in Berlin and its Madrid spy station. These were references to the ‘Arabal
^fn1
undertaking’, a mysterious Nazi spy ring operating from inside Britain itself, headed by an agent called ‘Alaric’.

The thought caused a shudder. A phobia about enemy spies was gripping the country. There were rumours of jackbooted nuns parachuting into Warwickshire, signals ploughed into remote fields for German spotter planes, and chalk symbols on telegraph poles. One elderly lady had even concluded that her neighbour was sending messages to the enemy through a form of Morse code based on the long and short garments on her washing line. It was hard to know who to trust.

They were less excitable at Bletchley. Nonetheless, over the following weeks and months Mavis and her colleagues were to come across many more references to the sinister ‘Alaric’.