The Second World War was a many-faceted struggle. Battle lines were drawn on many fronts, but combat was not resolved exclusively by the G. I. on the black sands of Iwo Jima or in the bitter cold of the Ardennes. A sordid array of characters was fighting the war in such little-known places as Korcula and Saigon, and traipsing through supposedly secure areas such as U. S. Army arsenals and British RAF bases.
The German Abwehr, SD and SS, British MI-5, MI-6 and the ultra-secret X-Troop, Soviet Red Orchestra, and the fledgling American OSS were all spy organizations that played pivotal roles in the balances of information and power during the second great World War. In 1938 when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London from a Munich meeting with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and triumphantly declared “peace for our time,” the chiefs of secret intelligence agencies all over Europe knew better. Espionage was well under way, and the following year the German Wehrmacht opened the War by crushing Poland.
Nazi Germany had two agencies already spying: the Abwehr, a branch of the OKW, or Armed Forces High Command, engaged in keeping watch on such information as the military preparedness of foreign nations; and the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst, the secret intelligence and security service of the Nazi party, responsible for both internal surveillance and espionage abroad. England also had two agencies for military intelligence, MI-5 and MI-6. In theory, MI-5 dealt with domestic security and MI-6 with foreign espionage.
In practice, the concerns of the two agencies frequently overlapped, as did the respective concerns and agendas of Germany’s Abwehr and the SD. One British intelligence coup of particular note takes place before the invasion of Sicily. Carried off by the espionage unit known as X-Troop in a deceptive scheme known as Operation Mincemeat, a British submarine deposited a corpse in the uniform of a Royal Marines major off the Spanish coast. “Major Martin” would be found with a briefcase containing documents and letters suggesting that Greece and Sardinia were the prime targets for landings.
The British officer that did not exist washed up in the Spanish waters according to plan. Hitler accepted the bogus information as genuine, disregarding the advice of his Intelligence experts, and at once ordered reinforcements to Greece and Sardinia. Sicily was thus left less heavily defended than it would otherwise have been. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the founder and initial commanding officer of X-Troop had written one of these letters of deception. Afterwards, when anyone mentioned this scheme, he would say jocularly that “Ma! jor Martin” was “the best Royal Marines officer I ever had on my staff. ”
X-Troop was arguably the strangest, most individualistic and most secret unit to wear uniform in any Allied army. Even its title was unusual. Winston Churchill suggested the enigmatic designation when Lord Mountbatten was forming the unit. “Because they will all be unknown warriors,” Churchill pointed out, “they must perforce be considered an unknown quantity. Since the algebraic symbol for the unknown is X, let us call them X-Troop. ” The unit was composed entirely of volunteers from various and diverse walks of life. Anti-Nazi Germans, Hungarians and Austrians. Many were Jews whose families had died in concentration camps.
All had volunteered for hazardous tasks where their particular backgrounds or qualifications were of great value. Sometimes the required skills for volunteers were somewhat bizarre: the candidate must be a chemist, or be able to drive a Rumanian railway locomotive The cryptic man behind the Nazi Abwehr spy network, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, built the Abwehr from an adjunct of the German military establishment into a vast organization that succeeded in gathering intelligence from thousands of spies all over the world. He relished his job as Abwehr chief, working from the start to establish his departments importance to the Nazi state.
He recruited agents by the thousands and dispersed them to sensitive listening posts about the world. through diplomatic maneuvering he won a set of written accords that guaranteed the autonomy of the Abwehr from the SS in matters of military intelligence. The provisos earned such respect that subordinates dubbed them the Ten Commandments. One day in 1941 Admiral Canaris was driving down a country road in Spain with a fellow officer when suddenly he braked, sprang from the car and gave a military salute to a shepherd tending a flock by the roadside. You never can tell when there’s a senior officer underneath,” Canaris muttered to his astonished colleague. Perhaps Navy Commander Karl Donitz described Canaris best when he called him a “man with many souls in his breast. ” He was a staunch authoritarian, but disliked wearing a military uniform and usually left his medals in a drawer. He preferred work to his family, and dogs to his fellow workers. He was so fond of his dogs, that on trips he used secret radio codes to keep informed about them. His close associate Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces, pronounced him “an enigma and a closed book. For the German spy himself and for the Abwehr behind him, espionage was a complicated business that entailed exhaustive preparation and constant watchfulness. Whether he was assigned to cross enemy lines on the battlefield-a task that often devolved to mere boys- or to serve in a foreign country, an agent usually had training at one of some 60 spy schools the Abwehr operated in Hamburg, Berlin and other major cities. There, would-be agents learned such skills as message encoding, radio operation and micro-photography to enable them to send their intelligence secretly back to Germany.
For many missions, training in physical skills was vital; one group of agents bound for Scotland lost their ground transportation when they failed to prevent their bicycles from sliding off their rubber dinghy into the North Sea. Once he had made it across enemy lines or into an enemy country, the spy had the contradictory duty of concealing his activity while doing his job. In trying to meet these dual demands, most spies failed; an estimated 95 per cent of those who went in search of military intelligence behind enemy lines were caught and executed or imprisoned.
Even where there was no fighting, spying was perilous. Police and spy-conscious citizens pounced at the slightest suspicion. In the United States between 1941 and 1945 the FBI alone arrested some 4,000 suspects, and 94 of them were eventually convicted. In the first stunned days after December 7, 1941, most Americans believed that only a vast underground network of Japanese spies could have provided the information that had made the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor so accurate and so devastating.
But in fact, Japanese intelligence on Pearl Harbor came largely from readily available data: Some information was gleaned from published maps; some of it was gathered openly under the noses of tourists and shipboard passengers. The only Japanese spy at Honolulu was a man named Takeo Yoshikawa, a 25-year-old Navy ensign who was posted to the consulate there in March 1941. His assignment was to behave as a diplomat while monitoring the day-to-day activities of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Yoshikawa’s method was simplicity itself.
By day he sallied out like any tourist, in slacks and an aloha shirt, and usually escorting a pretty companion. Sometimes he taxied around the island; sometimes he cruised the harbor in a sightseeing boat. Once he sprawled on the grass at Wheeler Field to watch an Army air exercise; another time he took an aerial junket around the island, chatting amiably with his companion while snapping photographs of the airfields and naval installations below. At night Yoshikawa frequented a tea-house on the heights above Pearl Harbor.
He flirted with the Japanese waitresses, drinking enough to seem idly relaxed but not so much as to be unpleasant- and all the while he kept an ear open for loose talk. The proprietor, who did not know Yoshikawa’s real purpose, let him sleep off his carousing in a spare room from which he had a view of the harbor. All of these activities appeared to be so innocent and so commonplace that they aroused no suspicion if they were noticed at all. But when Yoshikawa’s nightly carousing ended, he made notes and maps from memory. He turned them over to the Consul General, who relayed them weekly to Tokyo.
There other Japanese intelligence officers marked maps and constructed three-dimensional mock-ups of the base. When Japanese pilots attacked Hawaii on December 7, they had in their laps aerial photographs and charts detailing their targets, based on data gathered from available sources- or supplied by Yoshikawa. William J. Donovan, creator of America’s giant-killing intelligence agency, was a successful Wall Street lawyer, one-time Republican candidate for Governor of New York and longtime friend of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The invasion of Pearl Harbor had swept in like a storm, catching most Americans unprepared- but not William Donovan. Nicknamed Wild Bill for his recklessness as a football player at Columbia and for World War I battlefield exploits that had won him the rank of colonel and the Congressional Medal of Honor, Donovan had long been preparing for war. For years, this man- whom Roosevelt admired for his “blend of Wall Street orthodoxy and sophisticated American nationalism”- had served as the President’s unofficial eyes and ears, traveling all over the world to meet with its leaders.
Donovan hobnobbed with such figures as King Boris of Bulgaria, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and what one associate called “tons of prime ministers,” and he brought back political and military information that he believed would serve his country and his President well in the event of war. Donovan flew on so many missions for the President that political columnist Westbrook Pegler remarked: “Colonel Donovan seems to have a 50-trip ticket on the Clippers, which he must use up in a certain time or forfeit the remainder. Among Donovan’s destinations were Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Great Britain, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Spain and Portugal. On his second trip to London, Donovan was given the opportunity to examine in-depth the workings of the British intelligence services. He told Roosevelt he had been mightily impressed by the many clever field and counter-intelligence operations, but he was disturbed by the way the British handled their agent’s information. There was no central point where the mass of data they accumulated was being efficiently gathered, sifted, interpreted and condensed.
By the summer of 1941, Roosevelt himself had become so inundated by data from several American agencies- among them the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Army and Navy Intelligence and the Secret Service- that he asked Donovan to make specific proposals for one agency to collect and analyze such material. “It is essential we set up a central enemy-intelligence organization which would collect pertinent information,” Donovan told the President in a memorandum.
The data, he said, should be “analyzed and interpreted by specialized, trained research officials in scientific fields, including technological, economic, financial and psychological scholars. ” Donovan also noted the need for “psychological attack against the moral and spiritual defenses” of the Axis through propaganda, an art at which the Germans excelled. Privately, he spoke to Roosevelt also of the desirability of sabotage and guerrilla warfare, but he left any such suggestions out of his official memo because it was felt that the thought of Americans undertaking those measures might distress many politicians and generals.
Roosevelt enthusiastically agreed with Donovan’s recommendations, and the organization that would be known as the Office of Strategic Services, and eventually evolve into the CIA, came into existence! . Donovan’s first agents were trained by British, American and Canadian instructors at Camp X outside Toronto and at a former camp for children in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Later, other OSS camps were established at Congressional Country Club just outside Washington, at Catalina Island off the coast of California and at eight other sites across the United States.
Fledgling American agents learned to send Morse code and to repair radio transmitters; to kill silently with garrote, knife and their bare hands; to parachute into almost any kind of terrain; and to handle Allied and Axis firearms- skills needed to work behind enemy lines. A German troop train shot through occupied Belgium like a mammoth bullet, heading toward a bridge that it would never cross: The OSS had arrived first. “When the train reached the halfway point,” an agent later wrote, “a splash of flame erupted.
It was the last thing the two German soldiers operating the locomotive were to see in this life. ” OSS saboteurs liked to combine targets- to knock out a train and a bridge, pull down power lines and block river traffic all in one blast. To help them, OSS scientists developed such deadly marvels as the “Mole,” which exploded as soon as the train it was attached to entered a tunnel. With other explosives disguised as coal, manure and flour, OSS saboteurs could hit any target they were able to get near. Operation Smashem in Greece ambushed 14 trains, blew up 15 bridges and destroyed 61 trucks.
Within a week of D-Day in France, the Allied-backed Resistance sabotaged some 800 similar targets. In Burma, the 566 OSS operatives and their 10,000-man guerrilla army destroyed 51 bridges and 277 military vehicles. The OSS smuggled some 20,000 tons of supplies into occupied Europe in 1944 alone. In Greece, the OSS furnished not only medical supplies but a mobile hospital, which was hauled from village to village by a packtrain of 134 mules. And American and British arms, dropped into! France, sparked the largest resistance uprising in history: It involved 00,000 freedom fighters, their raids closely coordinated with the Allied advance by OSS agents. In retrospect, the cloak and dagger business was not to be taken lightly in World War II. Without sabotage, disinformation, counterintelligence and covert data-gathering, the conventional military of each respective country would have been at a substantial loss. The war was won and lost through the blood and sweat of every mother’s son in uniform, but we must remember too the warriors in the shadows. “I am not what I am! “