Chapter Nine

THURSDAY, JUNE the 6th, 1941, was a fresh, sunny day in the little village of Aspley Guise, and despite the bad news from Crete, I was feeling good. For, on my personal front of the war, things were beginning to look up. Johannes Reinholz had joined the Gustav Siegfried team the previous day with his wife, and his very first script had shown that he was going to be able to write the kind of thing I wanted `The Chief' to put over.

A second point of satisfaction: Dick Crossman had asked me to take on a new assignment with the B.B.C. Together with him I was to listen to Goebbels's star broadcaster Hans Fritzsche doing his weekly pep-talk for the German public over Radio Berlin. Then, an hour and a half later, I was to tear Fritzsche to pieces with a reply over the German service of the B.B.C.

" If we pull this off," Dick had said, "it will help enormously to build up our audience. Millions of Germans listen to Fritzsche. If you do your stuff right, Tom, they'll all be wanting to hear you make him look silly."

As I have said, I had no great belief in the dry and dreary business of debating with the Nazis over the ether, an exercise of which the B.B.C. with its flock of would-be M.P.s was overfond. But this particular idea seemed different. It oozed human interest and listener appeal. The first clash with Fritzsche was booked for that evening, and I was looking forward to it. But just as I was about to get into the car, which was to take me up to London, the telephone rang. Leonard Ingrams was calling me.

" Why haven't you come over to the Abbey?" he asked, "don't you know you are wanted at an important conference here ?I told him no one had informed me, and that I was about to leave for London." You can get up to London later," said Leonard, "you simply have to be in on this thing. All the top brass will be there, and you may have to do some talking. Hurry!"

The stately ballroom of the Dukes of Bedford was already crowded when I got there. Sitting at long conference tables was the motley of University dons, advertising men, diplomats, motor salesmen, journalists, and officers from the Services that made up the top team of Britain's psychological warfare.

At a high table sat Lord Vansittart, Valentine V'illiams, Leonard Ingrams, Dr. Hugh Dalton, and some others whom I had not met before. Behind Dalton hovered a diffident, selfeffacing young man carrying the Minister's brief case-his Principal Private Secretary, Hugh Gaitskell.

Presiding in the Chair was the Department's own special boss, Rex Leeper-tall and spare with the thoughtful, concentrated face of some old-time papal secretary. I had known Leeper before the war, for he had been the Foreign Office Press Chief. Another point of contact was that his father, half a century earlier, had been the warden of my father's college at Melbourne University and his classics tutor. I admired Rex as one of the subtlest political brains I had met in the department, and my admiration was to increase as the war went on.

Rex had a flat, deliberately unemotional voice, guaranteed to make the most sensational announcement sound commonplace. But even he could not rob what he had to say now of its drama.

" Gentlemen," he said, when the last official had shuffled to his seat and lit his pipe, "I have obtained permission from the Prime Minister to reveal to you a piece of secret information which has been known to Mr. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff for several weeks, but has until now been denied any wider circulation. He has authorised me to impart it to you-and to you only-in order that we may concert as early as possible our plans for the situation which we shall be facing shortly.

Briefly, the information is that Hitler and his Wehrmacht are about to attack Soviet Russia. German armies have been secretly assembling on what I suppose will soon be called the Eastern Front. The actual invasion is expected to take placearound the middle of June. The estimate of the joint Intelligence Committee at their meeting yesterday was that June the 22nd is the most likely date.* You will all agree, I am sure, that we should start planning now, how best we should exploit this situation in both the overt field of political warfare, and in the covert. I will now call upon the heads of the regions for their suggestions."

This conference seemed to me a somewhat cumbrous method of planning, and indeed, not very long after, my journalist colleague Ritchie Calder was appointed head of a specially created Directorate of Plans which removed the necessity for over-large and over-long meetings of this kind. But here we were now, faced with several hours of verbiage. As the talk went on and on without anything but the obvious being said, my mind drifted off to other fields of speculation.

Into my day dreams broke the throaty, almost adenoidal voice of Rex Leeper-"And now, Mr. Delmer" he was saying, "will you please tell us what line that interesting character `Der Chef' is going to take?" I felt very nervous as I got up to speak. Oratory is one of the many accomplishments with which I am not endowed.

" `Der Chef', sir," I said, "is all for Hitler and this new war of his against the Bolsheviks. `Der Chef' will applaud and support the Fiihrer's decision." . Lord Vansittart, sitting next to Leeper, roared with laughter, and barked "Bravo, Delmer! Excellent!" But the rest of my colleagues knew nothing of Gustav Siegfried Eins. They stared at me in horrified incredulity.

" `Der Chef'," I went on, "will insist that the Fuhrer combines his anti-Bolshevik crusade against Soviet Russia with a cleaning-up campaign against the Bolsheviks at home, the Bolsheviks that is, of the National Socialist German Workers Party. He calls them `Die Parteikommune', an interesting hybrid made up of `Partei' meaning the Nazi Party and `Kommune' the word by which the Nazis themselves used to refer to the Communists. `Der Chef' has collected a great deal of astonishing material about the Parteikommune which he will bring to the attention of the Fuhrer."

Now they all laughed. `The Chief' had at least provided the comic relief of the meeting. I travelled to London that afternoon for my first appointment with Fritzsche feeling a strange new elation and confidence.

The war against Russia was the making of `Der Chef'. He now became an entirely plausible figure. As he ranted against the Russian Bolsheviks in Moscow and the Party Bolsheviks at home, I felt that I might be listening to old Ludendorfl: When things began to go wrong,

`The Chief' blamed all mishaps on the party. He did not actually use the word `Dolchstoss' or refer openly to `the stab in the back', favourite alibi of German generals.

And, of course, he never used the word `Nazis' which would have smacked of propaganda talk. But with each new, carefully detailed story he told of the scandalous private and public life of the Parteikommune officials the moral was there: "while our brave soldiers are freezing to death in Russia because of the corruption of this Parteikommune crowd, who delayed getting the army's winter clothing ready in time because they were out for a bigger profit, these same traitorous swine are having a wonderful time feathering their nests in soft job billets far from danger and privation". The Party was to blame, the Wehrmacht were the good men, the decent Germans, the true patriots.

I made the Nazi party functionaries the number one target of our attack because, in my opinion, the fanatical and dedicated officials of Hitler's organisation were doing an amazingly effective job as the driving force behind the war effort of the German people.

I was immensely impressed by the way Goebbels and his underlings, high and low, were succeeding in cheering and goading the Germans to ever greater efforts, and ever greater sacrifices. If we could blacken these men in the eyes of the German public as a venal and slothful privilegentsia which demanded everything from the common man, but made no sacrifices itself, why then we would have struck a mortal blow at a vital nerve of German's war morale. Not only that. We would be giving the ordinary German a splendid excuse for any falling short in his own devotion to duty:

"Why should I put up with this," he would be able to say to himself, "when those party swine can get out of it all?"

`Der Chef' told how party highups used their inside knowledge to secure privileges for themselves at the expense of Germany's war economy. But when doing so, he was always at great pains to reveal exactly how the Nazi big shot had done his foul deed, in the hope that listeners would follow his dastardly recipe themselves. This was what Leonard Ingrams called `operational propaganda'-propaganda which made people do things. And sometimes it worked.

In one of his transmissions for instance, `Der Chef' denounced by name the wives of a number of high party officials in the Schleswig-Holstein area who, he said, had rushed to the clothing stores (also named) and bought up all the woollen goods and textiles to which they were entitled by their clothing coupons.

Why? Because these traitorous whores had learned from their obscenity husbands that the Fatherland's supplies of textiles were running out owing to the needs of the army in Russia, and that any folkcomrade who did not cash his clothing coupons now, would not be able to buy anything at all a little later.

Sure enough, about six weeks later when I was looking through a Kiel newspaper which had been published shortly after `The Chief's' Philippic, there it was, the report of a run on the clothing stores. And to my great satisfaction the editor made things worse by reiterating `The Chief's' most effective argument. "If everyone behaves like this," he wrote, "there will be nothing left for anyone, and the clothing coupons will be valueless."

We never attacked internationally known big shots like Goring, Goebbels, and Himmler. They were the routine targets of all enemy propaganda. To give ourselves greater authenticity as a German station we went for the lesser-known local dictators.

Our stories were peopled with Burgomasters, District leaders, Local Group leaders, and even Cell leaders, with whose goings on, both private and public `Der Chef' showed an astonishingly intimate acquaintance. We spread over them a slime of obloquy as foul as that which they themselves had spread over the Jews.

Not even the sexual extravagances of those who came under `The Chief's' microscope were safe from his detailed and truly evangelistic denunciation.

In fact, to equip our heroes and heroines with the appropriate fetishisms and perversions-beloved of German audiences -I had to do a considerable amount of research in the works of that great authority on sexual aberrations, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Had he been able to hear `The Chief', I believe Dr. Hirschfeld would have felt that the burning of his books by the Nazis had been avenged at least in part. And, of course, these outspoken and unabashed diatribes added enormously to the listener appeal of the station.

But Gustav Siegfried Eins was doing far more than that. With every broadcast a new legend was being drummed home: the Army is against the Party, the Army is against the SS, the Army is against the Gestapo ... It was the legend that was to be our platform, the notional justification of most of our `black' operations. And alas! in the years after the war it was to prove a most dangerous boomerang.

In the earliest weeks of Gustav Siegfried's activities the stories with which `The Chief' spiced his homilies were entirely fictitious. For some of them the ideas and material came to us from the special Rumour Committee. This was a small body of experts from the various Services and the Ministry of Economic Warfare who met in conclave once a fortnight and compiled a short list of rumours which secret agents were to put around for German consumption in such centres as Lisbon, Zurich, Stockholm and Istanbul.

Around the nucleus of one of the committee's rumours which I had selected from the list-the rumours were called `sibs' from the Latin sibillare = to whisper -we built up a detailed and colourful story.

Most of our `sibs' however, and the stories to go with them we concocted ourselves. And, unlike other writers of fiction, we took great pains that the dramatis personae figuring in them should whenever possible be genuine living persons, employed or residing at the addresses `The Chief' gave them. Also that they should be persons who, as far as rank and calling went, fitted the role ascribed to them.

How did we get these names and addresses? Out of the German newspapers and magazines. Even before Max Braun had joined us, while I was having to act as my own intelligence expert and archivist, I had begun a file of personalities, high and low. I collected them from the news columns of the German newspapers, from the announcements of births, deaths, and marriages, from the small advertisements. If I required an engine driver living in the district of Cassel, or a greengrocer's shop in Berlin's Hansa district, my files could provide them.

Often, too, newspaper articles provided the inspiration for a Gustav Siegfried story. As, for instance, when I read a feature article in one of Dr. Goebbels's periodicals which praised the blood transfusion units of the Nazi medical service and obligingly singled out for special mention, by name, certain meritorious doctors and nurses.

" I think you might have a go at these folk-comrades," I said to the Corporal handing him the magazine, "they have been guilty of criminal carelessness. As you no doubt know, they have been collecting most of their blood from Polish and Russian prisoners.

And they have been treating these Polish and Russian blood donors just as though they were good, clean Germans. Believe it or not, they have been taking their blood without first giving the fellows a Wasserman test. One of our splendid old army doctors-Simon (i.e. Max Braun) will give you a name and a hospital-grew suspicious when some of our brave wounded, who had received transfusions developed unpleasant symptoms. He made a random Wasserman test of the blood sent to his hospital and found that twelve per cent gave a positive reaction.

Our army doctor immediately notified the Parteikommune scum-these fellows in the magazine-and suggested they destroy their stocks. And what do you think they had the gall to answer? `Venereal diseases,' they said, `are not transferable by blood transfusion and there is no point in doing a Wasserman or destroying existing stocks.' And so these traitors, to cover up their negligence, are not only refusing to notify the units to whom they have sent the infected blood, but are continuing to send out more from the same sources, so that more and more infected Slav blood is being pumped into the men who have given their own clean German blood for the Fatherland. How do you like that Corporal?"

The Corporal liked it very much, and the next evening `The Chief' broadcast the harrowing tale. It was not long, however, before I began to build up a supply of intelligence from sources other than newspapers which helped us to provide a more and more suitable background for our rumour stories.

One invaluable source of the kind of intelligence essential to our work were the monitoring reports made at the prisoner of war cages. These recorded verbatim the highly interesting conversations between newly captured German prisoners of war. The prisoners, unaware that the walls of their quarters, and even the trees in the garden, contained hidden microphones, freely revealed the favourite grouses of the German servicemen and many tit-bits of gossip that came in useful.

They also gave us many new slang expressions that had come into use since the war, and enabled us to bring `The Chief's' soldier language right up to date. I found too, that abbreviations, like `Teno' for `Technische Nothiffe' (i.e. Technical Emergency Service, employed for repairing Air Raid damage and so forth), gave a particularly authentic inside-Germany sound to `The Chief's' oratory. And I therefore made a special collection of them.

To begin with I only saw these monitoring reports very occasionally. Valentine Williams had them, and when he did let me see them, I had to read them in his office at the Abbey. But soon I had succeeded in laying on my own contraband supply, smuggled to me by Colonel A. R. Rawlinson, the Deputy Director of the interrogation cages, who realised the importance of these monitoring reports to our operations. Another source were the letters intercepted by the Postal Censorship on their way from Germany to Neutral AmericaNorth, Central, and South. They were an inexhaustible mine of material. There was Genevra Wolff Limper, for instance, the young American-born wife of a Cologne industrialist, who wrote splendid gossip-rich letters to her girl friend Mrs. Ruth Stradling somewhere in Nevada.

Genevra Wolft-Limper and her husband moved in the exalted circles of Cologne's young Nazi Burgomaster, Herr Winkelkampner, and Gauleiter Grohe. And as she was full of ingenuous wonder at all that was going on around her, and described everyone she met, and the parties at which she met them, in beautifully naive `Gentlemen prefer blondes' detail, `The Chief' was able to fake up some most convincing stories about what he denounced as the sybaritic life of the Cologne Parteikommune and their goings on.

* Der Angriff 12. 10- 1943

* Ciano's Diary, page 366. * Churchill in the light of agents' reports had decided as early as the end of March, that Hitler was going to attack Russia. The Joint Intelligence Committee however, discounted these reports. While the Chiefs of Staff decided on May 31ist that an attack was imminent, the J.LC. did not concede it until June 5th.

I can well imagine the fury and anguish of Party Comrade Winkelkampner as he listened to `The Chief' describing the magnificent sugar cake baked in the shape of Cologne Cathedral with which Herr Winkelkampner regaled his guests at a party just after the sugar ration had been drastically cut for ordinary folkcomrades. He must have wondered who was the traitor. But I am sure that neither he nor the Gestapo ever guessed her identity. For Black Propaganda, whether it was Gustav Siegfried or one of our later ventures, never used a piece of intelligence straight. We always `improved' it so that its source became unidentifiable.

When, for instance, I learned that Dino Alfieri, Mussolini's ambassador to Berlin, was shortly returning to Rome for consultations, `The Chief' did not announce this as news, as the B.B.C. or Reuters would have done. He did not say: "It is learned that Signor Alfieri is shortly returning to Rome for consultations. In diplomatic circles it is believed that the probable purpose of his journey is to discuss, etc.... etc. . . ." Gustav Siegfried's task was to exploit this piece of intelligence, not merely to communicate it. And `The Chief's' reaction was to demand Alfieri's recall. So that when this favourite of Ribbentrop's did, in fact, leave Berlin a few days after `The Chief's' broadcast, his journey was seen as proof of Gustav Siegfried's allegations.

The Alfieri broadcast was one of `The Chief's' best, and it is still reverberating today. For his story was accepted as the truth. It even crept into diplomatic dispatches, and thence into Ciano's Diary.* Here it is. In justification of his demand that Alfieri must go, `The Chief' recounted how a German officer (full name and rank stated), had come home unexpectedly on leave from the Eastern Front. In his Berlin flat-(street and house number stated)- the officer discovered his wife lin flagrante delicto with the ambassador.

The Kamerad, reported `The Chief', drew his service revolver and would have shot the ambassador there and then, had not this cringing coward of a Macaroni gone down on his knees and pleaded diplomatic immunity! So, instead of shooting him, the Kamerad had beaten up the spineless creature until he could neither see, hear, nor stand. Then he had bundled the fellow into a car and delivered him to his embassy.

Ciano, in his Diary for July the 3rd, 1941, recorded that "Alfieri's star appeared to be on the wane in Berlin", and that the Duce had laughed heartily when he heard how Dino was beaten up by a German officer. Our best source of information, help and inspirationapart from Leonard Ingrams and his Ministry of Economic Warfare-was the Admiralty. And it was to the Admiralty and the Naval Intelligence division, in particular, that I owed the intimate relationship which soon grew up between my `black' unit and the fighting services. In its turn, it was this collaboration with the Intelligence and Operational Planning sections of the services which caused what had begun as a pin prick rumour operation to develop into the major weapon of Psychological Warfare it ultimately became.

When I ask myself today, why the Navy should have been the first of the Services to discover and support us, I find I can put down a number of factors. For one thing, the Navy was fighting an all-out war from the beginning without any respect for the phoney war imposed on the Army and the R.A.F. by the French. They had contact with the enemy. They had prisoners and they had an intelligence of the kind that could be useful to us. For another, I had personal friends in Naval Intelligence. Ian Fleming had introduced me to his boss Admiral John Godfrey, as soon as I arrived back from the campaign in Poland in 1939.

And when I had told Godfrey in April 1941 that I would not be able to go to Lisbon for him after all because of the new `Black Radio' job I had been given, he was immediately interested. He saw at once that propaganda of this kind could be of value in the attack on the morale of the U-boat crews. He also recognised that we could be of help in misleading his opposite numbers in the German Admiralty's Intelligence division-though this was a function we did not develop until we possessed a more elaborate means of communicating with the enemy than Gustav Siegfried Eins.

Above all, this shrewdest of our wartime Directors of Naval Intelligence saw the great advantage that `Black' had over 'White'-as the overt broadcasts of the B.B.C. and the R.A.F. news-sheets came to be called-through its ability to use intelligence rather than to reproduce it, a faculty which safeguarded the security of N.LD.'s sources. Admiral Godfrey was so impressed with the possibilities of psychological attack on the enemy crews that he set up a special Propaganda Section and asked me to come to the Admiralty to coach the officers of the new section in the elements of the art during its first weeks.

The Admiral had installed his personal staff in a vast barn of a room immediately adjoining his own very comfortable inner sanctum. Somehow this outer workshop-N.LD. 17 was its Admiralty title-reminded me of the Arab banks I had visited in Tangier and Beirut.

Ian Fleming, the `chief clerk'-his code number was 17Fsat at a desk guarding the glass door to the boss's room, which overlooked the Horse Guards Parade. At a dozen desks of varying shapes the other `clerks' beavered away at stacks of papers. The `clerks' however were all naval officers, and their papers were not bills of exchange and freight letters but top secret reports. Each desk represented a special field of Intelligence activity and each had its special code number, N.I.D. 17a, N.LD. i 7b, N.LD. r 7c and so on. Now a new desk had been moved into N.LD. 17 for the Propaganda section. And this section too received its code letter-the last in the alphabet.

I felt considerable trepidation the first time I called on the officers of N.LD. t'7z, my `pupils' as Ian insisted on describing them. I feared they would resent the intrusion of a civilian. But the R.N.V.R. lieutenants sitting at the new desks could not have been more friendly and deferential

. There were three of them the first time I called. One was Robert Harling, a young man with the laughing, big-eared, long-nosed face of a medieval court jester and the shrewd appraising eyes of a physician. He was an artist typographer in civilian life, Ian told me, as he introduced us. (Robert Harling is today Editor of House & Garden, and author of several best-selling novels of suspense.) The second, whom Godfrey had picked to command the section, was a bony, sandy-haired Scotsman called Donald McLachlan. (Today Donald McLachlan is the Editor of The Sunday Telegraph.)He had been a don at Winchester, had spent a short time in the Berlin office of The Times, and had then worked for several years on The Times' foreign desk. The third was a young Marine Officer called David Astor. (The Honourable David Astor is now the Editor of The Observer.) But Astor had been posted to another unit by the time I next visited the department.

It only took a few visits to convince me that we could not have a better officer to service `Black' with intelligence material and ideas than the methodical and imaginative ex-schoolmaster McLachlan. He had been brought out of the Army by Admiral Godfrey in 194o and trained in all branches of naval intelligence. His latest duty in N.LD. had been the ideal preparation for `Black'. For Godfrey, as though he had sensed the kind of thinking we were going to demand of Donald McLachlan, had made him secretary to the F.O.E. (Forward Operations Enemy) sub-committee of the Chiefs of Staff which appraised enemy intentions over the whole war front, and it had been Donald's special duty to write a paper every week on the war at sea as it would appear to a German Intelligence Officer.

But I was delighted with the new section for yet another reason. For up to this time the Admiralty in common with the other Fighting Services had left Psychological Warfare to their Public Relations Department, and I had found that the Public Relations Officers had neither the access to the kind of intelligence material we needed, nor did they have the understanding for our indirect subversive approach to the enemy. This was no fault of theirs. For their job was the straightforward one of projecting the splendour and invincibility of the British Navy to the world through newspapers and radio. They were not conditioned for the devious approach needed for deceiving and tricking the Germans

. Admiral Godfrey's plan had been for N.LD.17z to conduct its attack on the German crews through the B.B.C. as well as through `Black'. But although Carlton Greene made time available for McLachlan and Harling to produce a special naval programme on the B.B.C. he would not let them write a special naval news bulletin. The news had to be written by the B.B.C. and no outsiders were allowed to interfere with it. The operatives of N.LD. 17z were therefore confined to commentaries, which was disappointing. For, in my view, and that of Donald McLachlan, carefully selected news items, skilfully presented are the most subversive propaganda force of all.

The result of this B.B.C. obstinacy was that the Admiralty turned more and more to `Black'. And soon, as the reader will learn, `Black', with the Admiralty to back it, intruded into the most sacred preserve of the B.B.C. with a live news broadcast of its own. What the Admiralty liked about `Black' was its ability to make statements, about sinkings for instance, without the Admiralty being held responsible. Had they been broadcast by the B.B.C. on the other hand they would have been quoted as official Admiralty statements. (The B.B.C. of course cannot be blamed for this.)

Moreover, the Navy had been impressed by the evidence that now began to come in, that Gustav Siegfried had built up a substantial audience in Germany and that `Der Chef's' stories were getting around. The new formula appeared to be working.

Gustav Siegfried's left-wing stable companion, the `Sender der Europaischen Revolution', had produced little or no reaction in Germany. Nor had its right-wing predecessor. German prisoners seemed never to have heard of either. `Der Chef', however, after only a few weeks produced a crop of startling `comebacks', as we called the bits of direct and indirect evidence that a station was being listened to. What pleased me most was when I found a story we had invented being retailed as fact by the Germans without any mention of Gustav Siegfried as the source.

Great was my delight for instance, when in the P.O.W. monitoring reports I found a freshly captured German Luftwaffe officer telling the story about Nazi boss Robert Ley and the Diplomat Rations which `Der Chef' had invented and broadcast only three weeks before. It was a good little story.

The father of a kitchen maid who had recently left her employ in the Ley household had telephoned the Ley major-domo to ask for his daughter's ration cards to be sent on to her. "This is the Palais Ley," grandly answered the major-domo. "We have no ration cards here. We don't bother about them, you know. Here we have Diplomat Rations!"

The so-called `Diplomat Rations' had been instituted by the German Government for foreign embassies in Berlin and certain government departments that had to entertain for representational purposes. Gustav Siegfried Eins made out that the party big shots had all got themselves fixed up with `Diplomat Rations' as a way of evading the rationing laws to which the common man was subject. The Ley story we had invented as an example. And here was the proof now out of the mouth of this Luftwaffe officer, that Germans had accepted our story and were passing it on.

We plugged the diplomatic rations racket with such effect that Goebbels and Ley had to lay on a special campaign to counter it. Robert Ley himself went on record in Goebbel's newspaper Der Angriff". . . we National Socialists know no such thing as Diplomat Rations-every man, whether he is a Reich Minister or a Reich Leader, has to live on his rations just like any ordinary workman, mechanic and official. The normal rations are enough. I myself am a normal consumer and live on them. . . ."

But by the time they got around to this dementi we were able to quote the decree authorising special rations for diplomats and party officials with representational duties.** We were even able to give them the colour of the certificates and the exact scale of the Diplomat rations.

There were plenty of other `comebacks'. The most entertaining of them all, however, was one that showed up the greatest danger inherent in `black' operations-the danger of misleading your own side. In those days of the Summer and Autumn of 1941, the Americans still had an embassy in Berlin. And just as Franco's Foreign Office used to show the Duke of Alba's dispatches from London to the Germans, so did the State Department allow the Foreign Office to see the reports they were getting from Berlin. In due course, Foreign Office dispatch boxes with copies of these reports made their way up to Woburn Abbey where they were carefully scrutinised for anything that might help us with our picture of war-time Germany.

Valentine Williams was reading the report of one of the American Service Attaches, when his eyes lit on a passage that filled him with mischievous triumph. The American reported that there had been a dramatic increase in the hostility of the army to the Nazi party since the invasion of Russia. The army, he said, had gone so far as to set up a radio transmitter trom which a nameless officer referred to as `Der Chef' was broadcasting violent attacks on certain sections of the party. An ever increasing number of Germans, said the American diplomat, were listening to the broadcasts of this officer. The German Government's attempts to locate his transmitter and have it shut down had so far failed, probably because an important army authority was shielding the group of which the officer was the spokesman.

Valentine Williams called me in, and congratulated me. I felt a little less sanguine about this `comeback' than Valentine, because I suspected that the American Officer might be writing with his tongue in his cheek, in order to tell us that we were being heard. But further dispatches came in, each quoting `The Chief' at length. And each insisted that the emergence of this station was a most significant indication of the increased strength and confidence of the anti-Party undergound in the army. I was forced to agree with Valentine that we appeared to have deceived our American friends.

Valentine Williams now called a conference to decide what was to be done. For it was by no means desirable that the Americans should be under the illusion that they had only to sit on the fence a little longer, and Hitler would be overthrown by his army. But could we warn them, without disclosing our operation to the whole wide world? At last it was decided that David Bowes-Lyon, the brother of the Queen who was our Washington representative, should call on President Roosevelt at the White House and reveal the truth to him on the strict understanding that it was for Roosevelt's ears alone.

David performed the task admirably. Instead of Roosevelt being chagrined at the thought that his diplomatic agents had fallen for such a simple deception, he had the President chuckling and chortling, as though the whole affair had been specially laid on for his amusement. Unfortunately, however, Roosevelt's ideas of security were not as strict as ours. The President could not refrain from telling his friends the trick the British were playing on the Germans. And soon the story of Gustav Siegfried Eins was all over Washington.

When the United States came into the war, Rex Lecper was besieged by Americans demanding to be initiated into the arts and techniques of `Black Propaganda'. One good result of this was the close and profitable collaboration between the emissaries of the Office of Strategic Services and myself. It was a collaboration which, like that with our British Fighting Services, became the basis of the most important and successful work my unit performed.

Gustav Siegfried Eins continued to defy the Gestapo and burn up the ether with its sulphurous broadcasts until the end of October 1943. Then I decided that we could make even better use of the Corporal in a new capacity: So `Der Chef' had to die-"caught at last". Alas, in dying `The Chief' suffered the only bad slip-up of his long career. For he died twice!

A transmitter engineer, knowing no German and unaware of the final nature of the broadcast-complete with tommygun salvo and gruff "Got you, you swine!"-went through his usual routine and repeated the record an hour after the broadcast that was supposed to be his last. Fortunately I heard it. I have never met anyone else who did.

Chapter's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aspistdistra Photos - Milton Bryan Photos - Contents

The Soul of Hitler : Series of articles published in July 1939 in the Daily Express "H.M.G.'s secret pornographer" : Article by Sefton Delmer Ian Fleming : Secret Memo Sefton Delmer Attack on Morale of German Forces in Norway : Article by Sefton Delmer on Lord Haw Haw