Intelligence and Espionage during the Second World War.
Latest WWII news. See also: WWII Spies, Army Rangers, Nazi Spies in America, Special Forces - Secret Missions, Female Spy, OSS, MI5.
Peace talks with Goering, planning to assassinate Mussolini -- Before the CIA, there was the Pond
The Pond was set up during WWII as a strictly American operation - unhindered by the European allies. It used sources from Nazi officials to Stalinists, including a French serial killer. Now the long-hidden roots of U.S. espionage can finally be explored as tens of thousands of secret files found in locked safes in a barn near Culpeper, Va., in 2001 have become public after a CIA security review. The Pond boasted with an attempt to negotiate the surrender of Nazi Germany with Hermann Goering 6 months before the war ended - and an effort to enlist mobster Charles "Lucky" Luciano in a plot to kill Benito Mussolini. (washingtonpost.com)
How Nazi spy was duped by failed actor who played Bernard Montgomery
In 1944 a boozy Australian actor Meyrick Clifton James saw one of the most unusual career revivals in history. James, who had lost a finger in the trenches, was not a great actor, but he could do a great impersonation of General Bernard Montgomery. When WWII broke out he volunteered to entertain the troops overseas, but ended up in Leicester in the Army Pay Corps Variety Troupe. On the eve of D-Day the failed actor found himself in the operation "Copperhead" (the basis for the film "I Was Monty's Double") - a plan to use Montgomery lookalike to fool Major Ignacio Molina Pérez, a Spanish spy in German employ. (timesonline.co.uk)
After World War II SS lieutenant Friedrich Buchardt was hired as a spy by British MI6
Friedrich Buchardt led a death squad (Einsatzgruppen) that followed the Nazi military machine to the Soviet Union to wide out tens of thousands of Jews and communists. He should have shared the fate of SS commanders who were hanged after the war. Instead he was hired as a spy by Britain's MI6. In a British PoW camp, he wrote document called "The Handling of the Russian Problem during the Period of the Nazi Regime in Germany" - a rundown of his espionage operations. For MI6, struggling to make the switch from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to Josef Stalin's communist regimes, this was gold. MI6 made it the blueprint for its spying activities behind the Iron Curtain. (dailymail.co.uk)
Portuguese Nazi spy almost changed course of war in 1942
A Nazi spy came within days of revealing one of the Allies' most important WW2 missions. Wireless operator Gastao de Freitas Ferraz was being paid by the Nazis to send coded messages about convoys to U-boats, and he was on the tail of the Allied convoy which included General George S.Patton (in command of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa). Ferraz, on board fishing vessel Gil Eannes, had it in his power to ruin the Allies' plans. But unknown to the Nazis, their messages were being decoded by the Bletchley Park codebreakers, and the Admiralty sent out a signal: "If the vessel is sighted West of 11 degrees West... de Freitas [Ferraz] should be removed." (timesonline.co.uk)
World War II SOE agents failed the honey trap test at their training centre
Trainee secret agents were tested for their resilience to the 'honey trap' at a Surrey manor house, reveals an analysis of the role Britain's country properties played during the war. But few managed to keep their secrets to themselves. Tests of Special Operations Executive (SOE) spies only proved how unreliable most of them were. Historian Marcus Binney wrote: "Elizabethan Wanborough Manor ... was one of the houses where trainee agents were plied with drink to see if they would talk when light-headed. The glamorous girls employed to extract details... were so successful that the tests were abandoned as ever more brave, painstakingly trained young men succumbed." (telegraph.co.uk)
Carl Aschan: WWII intelligence officer who helped to hunt down Nazi leaders
Carl Aschan, who has died aged 102, worked for British intelligence in his native Sweden during World War II and in 1945 helped to track down some of the Nazi leaders. He planned operations against German garrisons in Norway and the Channel Islands. At the end of the war he was sent to Germany, where he was attached to an armoured battalion. At Flensburg Aschan and his comrades arrested the head of the German Secret Service in Stockholm. His team also confined armaments minister Albert Speer and the propagandist William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw"). At attempt to seize SS chief Heinrich Himmler at Glücksburg Castle was less successful. (telegraph.co.uk)
Operation Ruthless - Ian Fleming's plan to outwit the Nazis
The plot designed by Ian Fleming in 1940, over a decade before he created James Bond, was so preposterous that it can be seen as the prototype 007 mission. Fleming, a WW2 naval intelligence officer, was the architect of Operation Ruthless, a daring plan to seize a German codebook that may have inspired the plot to From Russia with Love. His plan, calling for a staged plane crash and disguised commandos, is revealed in full at the Imperial War Museum. It was created after codebreakers at Bletchley Park could not efficiently decode the German navy messages without copies of their conversion tables. (timesonline)
George Weidinger helped uncover Nazi secrets at PO Box 1142
In 1942, a highly classified military intelligence unit was formed at Fort Hunt. Known only as PO Box 1142, for the mailing address of its 1,000-plus personnel whose work remained secret until the National Park Service revealed parts of the fort's history. The unit interrogated Nazi Germany's top officers, officials and scientists. The Allies learned about German research in rocketry, the atomic bomb, the jet engine, U-boats, microwaves and infrared technology. Among the prisoners were Wernher von Braun, Reinhard Gehlen and Heinz Schlicke. Though this unit and its intent violated the Geneva conventions, extracting information was done without torture. (clevelandseniors.com)
The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France
During the German occupation of France, Suzanne Desseigne started contact with the Nazis. She became the mistress of a German soldier who enrolled her to conduct espionage missions against the Vichy regime. Her mother described the Nazi spy as "a young French girl who, from the age of 15... felt the danger of Bolshevism and of the Jewish conspiracy." She remained, even after her captivity, a earnest traitor, attacking other inmates who did not share her loyalty to the Nazi cause. --- Historian Simon Kitson's research of the French counterintelligence service's pursuit of German spies is precise, but maybe not aimed to appeal to a mass market. (nysun.com)
Nazi Klaus Barbie boasted of hunting down Che Guevara for CIA
Was Che Guevara's capture in Bolivia directed by the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, as the CIA made use of his anti-guerrilla skills? Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 children and the capture of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Documentary My Enemy's Enemy, by Kevin Macdonald, probes how Barbie's record was brushed off when he was enrolled by CIA as a useful tool against communism. He avoided French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. Alvaro de Castro, a confidant of Barbie, told that Barbie had no respect for "pitiful adventurer" Che Guevara. (guardian)
Arno Mayer took care of captured Nazi German scientists, generals
The last thing a soldier wants to do is befriend enemy - unless it's his task. Arno Mayer, a history professor, had to do just that during the Second World War, taking care of Nazi prisoners as if they were his sick friends. He was stationed at Fort Hunt, Va., where the U.S. Army brought some Nazi generals and scientists for interrogation. "I was to keep them happy because we were trying to entice them to work for the American army. I was to provide them with newspapers, liquor and, one time, we came close to providing them with women. ... the main purpose was to get information about the order of battle of the red army." (dailyprincetonian)
Secret WWII files reveal rocky early years of US-UK Intelligence
British spies during World War II were frustrated by the lack of information-sharing with the FBI and feared Nazi agents could infiltrate Britain through the US. Newly declassified documents reveal that in 1941 MI5 officers were arguing for closer intelligence cooperation with the US agency. They feared German agents could hide themselves among the thousands of American diplomats, military personnel and journalists entering the country in the wake of the Lend-Lease agreement. "The 30,000 Americans who are arriving over here and the many hundreds here already, who at the moment are subject to little control, represent a grave danger to security..." (azstarnet)
World War II spies have their cover blown by MI5 - Camp 020
A blunder by MI5 has blown the cover on some of its top WWII agents. The identities of operatives are closely guarded, even after long periods of time. However, an innocuous file released to the National Archives has allowed a number of agents who operated during World War 2 to be identified. The information is contained in a schedule from the body's secret interrogation centre, Camp 020 (run by Lt Col.Robert 'Tin Eye' Stephens) in which captured German agents were "broken". The double-agent system, in which the centre played a key role, culminated when the Germans were fooled into believing Britain would attack in the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. (telegraph.co.uk)
Mafia Allies: America's Secret Alliance with the Mob in World War II
The U.S. Pacific fleet had been devastated in the Pearl Harbor attack, and Nazi U-boats were sinking Allied ships. The clannish Italians who made up the bulk of the fishing industry were well placed to supply critical information, but their distrust of outsiders prevented them from doing patriotic duty. An American Mafioso, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano was at a prison - to up to 50 years. Naval intelligence pulled some strings behind the scenes, and he was transferred to Albany. With his criminal mastermind Meyer Lansky acting as go-between, the Navy enlisted Luciano and the result was one of the great Allied counter-espionage successes. (nypost)
How Nazi spycatchers tried to subvert Britain`s bravest flying aces
The shadowy British organisation known as Source Columba operated from behind enemy lines from the earliest days of the 1939-1945 War bringing intelligence of German plans at top speed. The Confidential Pigeon Service was one of the most closely-guarded secrets of wartime espionage because of the value of the information it provided. Hundreds of trained birds were flown from Britain in bombers, the birds contained in small cases attached to parachutes, then dropped behind enemy lines at night. Each pigeon came with a miniature spying kit. However, as D-Day neared, the Germans became "pigeon-conscious" and came up with a fiendish plan to counter the winged spies. (telegraph.co.uk)
CIA records reveal American hand in birth of Japan's right wing
Colonel Masanobu Tsuji was a Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after WW2 for massacres and complicity in the Bataan Death March - And then he became a U.S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records, by the U.S. National Archives, document more fully than ever how Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. intelligence. The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view. The records fill in many of the blanks in the spotty documentation of the occupation authority's intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say. (informationliberation.com)
Military Intelligence expert Roberta Wohlstetter dies
Roberta Wohlstetter, a military intelligence expert who said faulty analysis of intelligence signals enabled Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941 and who saw the same danger in a possible Soviet nuclear strike, has died at 94. "Her seminal book on the intelligence failures that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor remains as relevant today as when she published it in 1962." In "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision" she argued that despite having broken Japanese diplomatic and naval codes, U.S. analysts had been unable to distinguish signals - intelligence data that would reveal the enemy plan - from noise (conflicting and misleading information). (usatoday)
Hidden Nazi Spy Codes -- "Heavy reinforcements for the enemy"
German spies hid messages in drawings of fashion models in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War II, according to British security service files. Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings. But British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them. For example, code "Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly" was hidden in a drawing of three young models. The files reveal other ingenious ways spies tried to send coded notes through the post. (washingtonpost)
WWII secret interrogators break their silence (Article no longer available from the original source)
For more than 60 years, they kept their military secrets locked deep inside. The brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 enjoyed no parades, no reunions and no wartime stories. Almost no one knew the place in history held by the men of Fort Hunt. But the declassification of military documents and the persistence of Brandon Bies, is bringing the men of P.O. Box 1142 out of the shadows. They questioned Third Reich scientists, u-boat submariners and soldiers at one of the US's most secretive camps. As the world war II progressed, P.O. Box 1142 shifted its attention to scientists in Nazi Germany. (msnbc)
U.S. recruited ex-Japanese army officers to form spy ring
The U.S. enlisted former top Japanese army officers after World War II to form a spy ring against communists in Japan and other countries, declassified U.S. intelligence documents show. Headed by former Lt. General Torashiro Kawabe, who served as deputy chief of the Imperial Japanese Army's General Staff, the intelligence organization resembles the Gehlen Org, an anti-communist spy group set up by former Nazi officer Maj. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who was also recruited by the U.S. after the WW2. As in the German case, key members of the Japanese group did not face war crimes charges under the postwar U.S. policy. (findarticles.com)
World War II Military Intelligence Service vets given their due
They did their World War II service in secrecy. For decades after, their work was classified, and they were forbidden to tell anyone. Veterans of the Military Intelligence Service got a bit of long overdue recognition: a plaque honoring the work done by more than 7,000 Japanese Americans who formed the unit. The MIS members were an key part of the U.S. victory in the war in the Pacific. They often ended up walking into caves and bunkers, armed with nothing more than a knowledge of Japanese culture, to convince soldiers to surrender. Gen. Charles Willoughby, intelligence chief for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, once said their work shortened WWII by two years. (honoluluadvertiser)
The shady world of Western intelligence services: Organisation Gehlen
A little history may be appropriate to understand the shady world of Western intelligence services. The German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) has an pedigree to the days of the Third Reich. Its own website admits that the `Organisation Gehlen` was its predecessor, but gives no information about them. Reinhard Gehlen was Hitler's senior intelligence officer on the Eastern Front and he transferred his expertise to the US as WWII ended. Gehlen's network of agents - including many with Nazi backgrounds who were bailed out of POW camps by U.S. intelligence officers - received millions of dollars in funding from the US until 1956. (mathaba)
Writer shone light on Goering, participated in espionage efforts (Article no longer available from the original source)
Kurt Singer, an anti-Nazi activist and spy during WWII, has died. His books include works on espionage and biographies (i.e. Hitler henchman Hermann Goering). He grew up in Berlin, where he became worried about the rise of Adolf Hitler. He began publishing an anti-Nazi underground weekly in 1933. The Nazis soon put a price on his head, and he fled to Sweden. With Kurt Grossman, he wrote a biography of Von Ossietzky that helped win the Nobel Peace Prize for the humanitarian. The writer worked as a spy, providing information about Russian and Nazi activities in Scandinavia. (charlotte)
MIS - Secret WWII Army Intelligence Unit
It`s time to revisit the exploits, knowledge, experiences and intelligence of the World War Two veterans of the U.S. Army`s Military Intelligence Service (MIS). The missions of the MIS were highly classified and still are not widely known. Information about MIS activities was not made public until over 30 years after the war. The MIS consisted of Americans of Japanese ancestry who performed a very wide range of important and often dangerous activities. (American Chronicle)
Operation Mincemeat - How a Corpse Saved Lives in WWII (Article no longer available from the original source)
In the spring of 1943, after the campaign in North Africa, the Allies began to plan the invasion of Hitler's "Fortress Europe." The best target was Sicily: It would provide a springboard for the invasion, and eliminate the Luftwaffe's presence. Allies faced three obstacles: (1) Sicily is a mountainous island which favored the defenders. (2) The Axis knew that it was logically the next move. (3) The invasion, codenamed Operation Husky, required a build up which would likely be detected. Sir Archibald Cholmondley, of the British Intelligence interservice XX Committee conceived the idea to plant false documents on a dead man and let them fall into the hands of the Germans. (local)
See also:
WWII Spies
Army Rangers
Nazi Spies in America
Special Forces - Secret Missions
Female Spy
OSS
MI5.