military person, and that the people trying to run him as a double agent had little knowledge of codes and ciphers. It was the perfect circumstance for Funkspiel — the epitome of the spymaster’s art.
It was initially not as ideal as Ritter might have imagined. Britain’s War Office wireless listening service — formerly MI8(c) but now renamed the Radio Security Service (RSS) — was not looking for spies, but only for illicit signals that might be used as radio beacons to guide in German bombers. Only suspicious transmissions in Britain were being sought, and they were not being monitored at all for their content.
This changed in December with the arrival at the War Office of a Canadian army signals officer who was looking for advice on how to handle the obviously clandestine wireless traffic being intercepted by a Canadian signals intelligence unit in Ottawa. Within two weeks, E.W.B. Gill, an Oxford professor and former wireless intelligence officer of the First World War, was dispatched to the Radio Security Service, then still based at Wormwood Scrubs (London) along with MI5, to have it abandon the radio-beacon searches and listen instead for what might be German enemy-agent transmissions. As the Canadians had discovered, there was plenty of suspicious stuff out there, but neither MI6 nor the Government Code & Cipher School had shown much interest.1
On learning that an RSS volunteer operator was handling the wireless communications of a double agent code-named SNOW that MI5 was running, Major Gill undertook to have the German side of the traffic studied. It was soon found that Hamburg, SNOW’s control station in Germany, was exchanging messages with another station, whose signal was moving along the coast of Norway — a ship. The cipher used was similar to the congratulations code that had been given to Owens, and Major Gill, with the help of Lieutenant Hugh Trevor-Roper, a twenty-six-year-old German-speaking Oxford scholar who had arrived with him, managed to puzzle it out.
The name of the ship was the Theseus , and it was reporting on neutral ships headed for British ports. On January 29, Gill forwarded this information to the Government Code & Cipher School, but instead of a thank-you, its chief, Commander Alastair Denniston, fired back that Gill should stick to listening and leave the cipher-breaking to the experts. Undaunted, Gill continued to have the Theseus traffic monitored, and extended the listening to other stations across the Channel that appeared to be exchanging transmissions of a similar type.2
The Theseus was a “spy ship,” as the term was applied during the Cold War to vessels that roamed the high seas listening in on foreign radio communications using sophisticated wireless receiving equipment. Ships could be positioned precisely where the signals of a distant transmitter could best be heard.
In the case of spies, once their signals were picked up and copied, the ship could be moved to where it could best retransmit them to the mainland station. In the case of the Theseus , this would have been Hamburg. It worked the other way, too. The wireless operator for SNOW could be made to hear the Theseus , depending on where the vessel was transmitting from.3
The choice of wireless operator for the Theseus must have been deliberate. He was twenty-four-year-old Friedrich Kaulen, son of a German merchant. Fair-haired and good-looking, he was R-2220, an agent of Nest Bremen. His Abwehr assignment immediately before the Theseus had been two years as a spy in England for Abt I Luft, and he had received kudos for his excellent photographs of British secret air fields, anti-aircraft batteries, and searchlight emplacements.
Ordinarily, the wireless operator on a military vessel would be a naval rating or, in the case of a spy ship, perhaps an army signals specialist. Kaulen, however, was an amateur civilian radio hobbyist, much like the volunteer operators who did much of the listening for the RSS, and
It was initially not as ideal as Ritter might have imagined. Britain’s War Office wireless listening service — formerly MI8(c) but now renamed the Radio Security Service (RSS) — was not looking for spies, but only for illicit signals that might be used as radio beacons to guide in German bombers. Only suspicious transmissions in Britain were being sought, and they were not being monitored at all for their content.
This changed in December with the arrival at the War Office of a Canadian army signals officer who was looking for advice on how to handle the obviously clandestine wireless traffic being intercepted by a Canadian signals intelligence unit in Ottawa. Within two weeks, E.W.B. Gill, an Oxford professor and former wireless intelligence officer of the First World War, was dispatched to the Radio Security Service, then still based at Wormwood Scrubs (London) along with MI5, to have it abandon the radio-beacon searches and listen instead for what might be German enemy-agent transmissions. As the Canadians had discovered, there was plenty of suspicious stuff out there, but neither MI6 nor the Government Code & Cipher School had shown much interest.1
On learning that an RSS volunteer operator was handling the wireless communications of a double agent code-named SNOW that MI5 was running, Major Gill undertook to have the German side of the traffic studied. It was soon found that Hamburg, SNOW’s control station in Germany, was exchanging messages with another station, whose signal was moving along the coast of Norway — a ship. The cipher used was similar to the congratulations code that had been given to Owens, and Major Gill, with the help of Lieutenant Hugh Trevor-Roper, a twenty-six-year-old German-speaking Oxford scholar who had arrived with him, managed to puzzle it out.
The name of the ship was the Theseus , and it was reporting on neutral ships headed for British ports. On January 29, Gill forwarded this information to the Government Code & Cipher School, but instead of a thank-you, its chief, Commander Alastair Denniston, fired back that Gill should stick to listening and leave the cipher-breaking to the experts. Undaunted, Gill continued to have the Theseus traffic monitored, and extended the listening to other stations across the Channel that appeared to be exchanging transmissions of a similar type.2
The Theseus was a “spy ship,” as the term was applied during the Cold War to vessels that roamed the high seas listening in on foreign radio communications using sophisticated wireless receiving equipment. Ships could be positioned precisely where the signals of a distant transmitter could best be heard.
In the case of spies, once their signals were picked up and copied, the ship could be moved to where it could best retransmit them to the mainland station. In the case of the Theseus , this would have been Hamburg. It worked the other way, too. The wireless operator for SNOW could be made to hear the Theseus , depending on where the vessel was transmitting from.3
The choice of wireless operator for the Theseus must have been deliberate. He was twenty-four-year-old Friedrich Kaulen, son of a German merchant. Fair-haired and good-looking, he was R-2220, an agent of Nest Bremen. His Abwehr assignment immediately before the Theseus had been two years as a spy in England for Abt I Luft, and he had received kudos for his excellent photographs of British secret air fields, anti-aircraft batteries, and searchlight emplacements.
Ordinarily, the wireless operator on a military vessel would be a naval rating or, in the case of a spy ship, perhaps an army signals specialist. Kaulen, however, was an amateur civilian radio hobbyist, much like the volunteer operators who did much of the listening for the RSS, and
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