sum of money and the ingredients for making secret ink. He was promptly transferred to the harsher regime at Camp 020, where skilled interrogators extracted an admission that his mother was living in the same Belgian village that had been mentioned in the ISOS decrypt. A confession soon followed, and Timmerman was removed to Wandsworth Prison for trial and eventual execution. In the meantime, an MI5 officer corresponded, somewhat ineptly, with Timmerman’s German controller, using his secret ink and his post office box number in a neutral country. The idea was to persuade the Germans that their agent was still at liberty. As soon as the details of his arrest were made public, it was hoped that the Abwehr would realise that Timmerman’s correspondence had been faked by MI5. According to the theory, the Abwehr would then congratulate themselves on MI5’s incompetence, demonstrated by their poor choice of agent. The Belgian was found guilty under the Treachery Act and sentenced to death, and the execution was duly carried out on 7 July 1942. As was customary in those days, a brief public statement was released the following day and carried in most newspapers. MI5 had calculated that immediately the official announcement had been spotted the Abwehr would realise that all the letters purporting to have beenwritten by their agent had been forgeries. A detailed review of the Timmerman letters would have confirmed the deception and revealed a number of deliberate errors. All had been thoughtfully constructed by B1(a) and then inserted into the covert texts but, much to MI5’s chagrin, the Abwehr appeared to ignore Timmerman’s death notice and the deliberate mistakes. Instead of suddenly breaking off contact, as had been expected, the Abwehr continued the traffic as if nothing was amiss, and the Twenty Committee decided to abandon the exercise before it got completely out of hand. The Abwehr could hardly have failed to spot Timmerman’s death notice, yet they seemed willing to continue with the bogus correspondence. Evidently, the Abwehr considered MI5 to be even less sophisticated than MI5 had anticipated or wanted!
Although this particular ploy failed, it is an illustration of the extraordinary lengths MI5 were prepared to go to in order to develop the double-cross system. On this occasion, a real German spy, SCRUFFY , had been hanged simply to promote MI5’s interests. As it turned out, the execution had failed in its prime intelligence purpose, to demonstrate MI5’s inefficiency. If anything, the episode, and certainly the Abwehr’s apparent willingness to remain in contact with an agent they knew to be dead, illustrated how easily the enemy could be taken in.
By the time Pujol emerged on the scene the Allied intelligence Machine had accommodated the Twenty Committee and had given due recognition to its achievements. The double-cross system now embraced the entire Abwehr effort in Britain, and was poised on the brink of much greater successes. B1(a)’s ever-expanding stable of real and notional agents had completely eliminated every independent German spy and had enabled the port security staff to prepare reception committees for new arrivals. RSS cryptanalysts were supplying GCHQ with valuable clues to the construction of the enemy’s latest ciphers, and their study of the opposition personalities had enabled them to build an accurate order-of-battle for both the Abwehrand the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). The B1(d) investigators at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School also benefited from the system because they frequently received advance warning of suspects. Clues from B1(a) also helped the B1(e) interrogators at Camp 020 to extract damaging admissions from even the most well-trained of spies. Most were genuinely astonished at the extraordinary depth of MI5’s knowledge about the Abwehr’s operations and intentions which, of course, had been obtained from the invaluable ISOS .
By the spring of 1942 the British
Although this particular ploy failed, it is an illustration of the extraordinary lengths MI5 were prepared to go to in order to develop the double-cross system. On this occasion, a real German spy, SCRUFFY , had been hanged simply to promote MI5’s interests. As it turned out, the execution had failed in its prime intelligence purpose, to demonstrate MI5’s inefficiency. If anything, the episode, and certainly the Abwehr’s apparent willingness to remain in contact with an agent they knew to be dead, illustrated how easily the enemy could be taken in.
By the time Pujol emerged on the scene the Allied intelligence Machine had accommodated the Twenty Committee and had given due recognition to its achievements. The double-cross system now embraced the entire Abwehr effort in Britain, and was poised on the brink of much greater successes. B1(a)’s ever-expanding stable of real and notional agents had completely eliminated every independent German spy and had enabled the port security staff to prepare reception committees for new arrivals. RSS cryptanalysts were supplying GCHQ with valuable clues to the construction of the enemy’s latest ciphers, and their study of the opposition personalities had enabled them to build an accurate order-of-battle for both the Abwehrand the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). The B1(d) investigators at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School also benefited from the system because they frequently received advance warning of suspects. Clues from B1(a) also helped the B1(e) interrogators at Camp 020 to extract damaging admissions from even the most well-trained of spies. Most were genuinely astonished at the extraordinary depth of MI5’s knowledge about the Abwehr’s operations and intentions which, of course, had been obtained from the invaluable ISOS .
By the spring of 1942 the British
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