Botched Nazi spy mission was act of sabotage, says historian

[AndyJWest]

Apparently Nazi spies sent to prepare for Operation Sealion were selected for low levels of intelligence: one pair "were stopped while cycling through Scotland on the wrong side of the road... the police discovered German sausages and Nivea hand cream in their luggage..." http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/22/botched-nazi-spy-mission-sabotage-germany

 

[MiloMorai]

From another board

 

There is a recent book out by one Monika Siedentopf which alleges that the German intelligence gathering effort "Lena" in preparation of "Seelöwe" was deliberately sabotaged by the Hamburg Abwehr office which was in charge. Fearing that the landings would be a massive bloody disaster, office chief Commander Herbert Wichmann and his cohorts (who would be called "good Germans, but bad Nazis" by MI 5 after the war) sent the most unsuited spies they could get hold off, mostly folks recruited from German-occupied countries who spoke little English, had little idea of local conditions etc., but were briefed in detail on the invasion plans. One pair was apprehended just a couple hours after landing by rubber boat, having ordered a bottle of cider at a pub in the morning in ignorance of regulations prohibiting alcohol to be served before noon.

 

Siedentopf, Monika: Unternehmen Seelöwe. Widerstand im deutschen Geheimdienst, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Munich 2014.

 

 

Possible. There is some suggestion in Ben McIntyres book about Eddie Chapman that at least one German officer knew full well Chapman was working for the British. But kept up the pretence, partly because he liked him,  and largely because he was apparently anti Nazi, and didnt really worry that much. There is a further suggestion that Chapman may even have played British Intelligence off against the Germans. Which whilst unlikely, would probably put him right up there with Sidney Reilly.

https://en.wikipedia...i/Eddie_Chapman

 

The Germans were (unfortunately for them) not exceptionally great at running intelligence operations anyway, they tended to end them way too early with little in the way of take. For example, the Venlo incident was trumpted as a German triumph. But its been pointed out many times that if they had kept the pretence of 'Germans trying to overthrow Hitler' running rather longer, they might have got a much bigger haul than just embarressing the Netherlands and getting 2 British agents in the bag.

https://en.wikipedia.../Venlo_incident

 

So how much of it is sabotage and how much outright incompetence? Pretty hard to say at this late date I would think. Certainly it suited the Nazis to portray it as sabotage I suspect.

 

 

While the "intentional sabotage" idea is tempting (there were also some allegations that one of the instructors in Abwehr school was a British agent, teaching agents to "behave like Brits" and slipping in various suspicious acts), let's not forget the "Do not seek conspiracy where stupidity is enough" Do not forget that SD-ran operations did not fare much better. At least in the West. And even in the east, the results were not all that great.

 

Do not forget that whether talking to Allied investigators or Western authors, "We were against Hitler so we sabotaged" is much better than "We just screwed up". After all wasn't there that "accounting trick" of reporting more Allied divisions to prevent moving troops from France to the Eastern front... Which then led to fear of second invasion and delayed movement of reinforcements to Normandy?

 

 

I think it's related with accounts on Operation Mincemeat that OKW never took an Allied division off their Order of Battle Tables. So the fictitious units that were reported were kept on their accounting tallies for what they may run up against. 

The Brits had a very wide and deep disinformation game running with the German intelligence in the UK. They turned so many agents that they were able to get corroborating material out via several German agents, carefully so it didn't seem SO right and was then made suspect. It annoys me to no end that the US's efforts were to the function of simply rolling up German agents rather than turning them and controlling their information feeds back to Germany.

[Emgy]

Somewhat related, the story of codename Garbo is remarkable:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Pujol_Garcia

 

 

He initially approached the British three different times,^[3] including through his wife (though Pujol edited her participation out of his memoirs),^[17] but they showed no interest in employing him as a spy. Therefore, he resolved to establish himself as a German agent before approaching the British again to offer his services as a double-agent.^[17]

 

Pujol created an identity as a fanatically pro-Nazi Spanish government official who could travel to London on official business;^[3] he also had created for himself a fake Spanish diplomatic passport via fooling a printer into thinking Pujol worked for the Spanish embassy in Lisbon.^[26] He contacted Friedrich Knappe-Ratey, a German Intelligence agent in Madrid codenamed "Frederico",^[27] and German Intelligence accepted him and gave him a crash course in espionage, including secret writing, a bottle of invisible ink, a codebook, and 600 pounds for expenses. His instructions were to move to Britain and recruit a network of British agents.^[3]

 

He moved instead to Lisbon, and – using a tourist's guide to England, reference books and magazines from the Lisbon public library, and newsreel reports he saw in cinemas – created seemingly credible reports that appeared to come from London.^[3] He claimed to be travelling around Britain and submitted his travel expenses based on fares listed in a British railway guide. A slight difficulty was that he did not understand the pre-decimal system of currency used in Britain,^[28] expressed in pounds, shillings, and pence, and was unable to total his expenses. Instead, he simply itemised them, and said that he would send the total later.^[29]

 

During this time he created an extensive network of fictitious sub-agents living in different parts of Britain. Because he had never actually visited the UK, he made several mistakes, including claiming that his alleged contact in Glasgow"would do anything for a litre of wine", unaware of Scottish drinking habits.^[3] His reports were intercepted via the Ultra program, and seemed so credible that the British counter-intelligence service MI6 launched a full-scale spy hunt.^[24]

 

In February 1942, either he or his wife (accounts differ)^[30] approached the United States after it had entered the war, contacting U.S. Navy Lieutenant Patrick Demorest in the naval attache's office in Lisbon, who recognised Pujol's potential.^[24] Demorest contacted his British counterparts.^[6]

 

The British had become aware that someone had been feeding the Germans misinformation, and realised the value of this after the German navy wasted resources attempting to hunt down a non-existent convoy reported to them by Pujol.^[6]

Edited August 23, 2014 by Calvamos

[LizLemon]

Somewhat related, the story of codename Garbo is remarkable:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Pujol_Garcia

 

There is a rather good documentary about this man. 

 

One of the funnier things is that at the end of the war his German handler sent him a letter of thanks for his service, some money and his personal best wishes. 

 

He also created a very extensive network of completely fictitious spies. In one case he passed on some info from one of his "informants" along with his personal belief that this information was unreliable.

[Kurfurst]

 

The Germans were (unfortunately for them) not exceptionally great at running intelligence operations anyway, they tended to end them way too early with little in the way of take. For example, the Venlo incident was trumpted as a German triumph. But its been pointed out many times that if they had kept the pretence of 'Germans trying to overthrow Hitler' running rather longer, they might have got a much bigger haul than just embarressing the Netherlands and getting 2 British agents in the bag.

https://en.wikipedia.../Venlo_incident

 

So how much of it is sabotage and how much outright incompetence? Pretty hard to say at this late date I would think. Certainly it suited the Nazis to portray it as sabotage I suspect.

 

 

They didn't just bagged 2 British agents. It was a crushing blow to British spy networks and a significant diplomatic victory for a casus belli against the Netherlands.

 

"German counter-intelligence operation in the Netherlands which resulted in the kidnapping of two British MI6 officers on the Dutch-German border in November 1939. By the beginning of the war the MI6 netowrk in the Netherlands had been penetrated by a V-man of the Nazi security service, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD. This enabled the SD to dupe one of the network's officers, Captain Sigismund Payne Best, into believing that a group of conspirators against Hitler wished to negotiate peace. Best reported his meeting to London and Chamberlain, the prime minister, was among those who believed the contacts were genuine. At a subsequent meeting the head of the SD's counter-espionage section, Walter Schellenberg, posing as a conspirator called 'Major Schaemmel', requested British peace terms. When, on 31 October 1939, the British cabinet learned about these negotiations, some -- especially Churchill -- objected strongly, which delayed an agreed reply until 6 November. Schellenberg then chose a cafe between the Dutch and German customs barriers near Venlo to receive the reply, and during a third meeting there, on 9 November, Best and another MI6 officer, Major Richard Stevens, were kidnapped and a Dutch intelligence officer was killed.

Until Himmler chose to reveal what had happened, on 22 November, the British remained mystified as the 'conspirators' continued to communicate with MI6 in The Hague. The Germans then scored a propaganda success by accusing Best and Stevens of plotting Hitler's demise; and one of the reasons they gave for invading the Netherlands in May 1940 was the collusion of Dutch military intelligence with the British.

Payne and Best were sent to concentration camps. They survived the war but the information one of them revealed under interrogation severely compromised other European MI6 networks. The only grain of comfort the British subsequently gained from the incident was that Schellenberg missed a valuable opportunity to establish the kind of double-cross system later employed in Englandspiel and by the XX-committee."

 

Venlo was major diplomatic embarrassment and a crushing defeat for the MI6 spy operations. Its rather wishful to display it some kind of missed opportunity with these double agents. That could have been done, as it was nothing new, but it had dubious chances given once the incident was made public - the MI6 would be well aware that their networks could have been compromised. This had to be weighted against a major and assured diplomatic/propaganda/intel gain that not only utterly crushed British spy networks, but more importantly it gave Germany an excellent casus belli against Netherlands (namely that the dutch were working the British to assisante the German chancellor), should the Western Allies still refuse to come to the negotiating table (and accept the status qou of Poland) and war would be necessary to conclude in the West - in which the Netherlands had strategic importance. After all, the spies caught didn't report anything of value the same, and the British rather lacked the means of establishing a new spy network in Germany afterwards, at least I am not aware of any particularly successful human intel operation afterwards; Venlo must have been a paralyizing blow. Hence their heavy British dependence on electronic intel for the rest of the war.