The stockholm protocol, p.1
The Stockholm Protocol, page 1
Other books by the same author:
Winston’s Spy
The White Rose
Teddy’s War
An Introduction to Franchising
(non-fiction)
Copyright © 2022 Robert Webber
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This is a work of fiction. However, for historical accuracy, it has been necessary to include some actual names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales and incidents that are used in a fictitious manner. The author has, wherever possible, tried to reflect accurately and sympathetically the personalities and occurrences that are a matter of historical record. Others are the products of the author’s imagination, and, in these instances, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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For David.
Diplomacy is a fact of life.
Even during conflict, diplomacy
remains and it can be argued
that during conflict is when
diplomacy is at its best.
Contents
Preamble
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
Preamble
It is often said that a victim does not hear the sound of the bullet or bomb that kills them, and whether that was true in the case of Major Peter Hart, we shall never discover. The head of MI3’s Section D that looked after intelligence received from Scandinavia and the Netherlands spent the night with his young actress lover in her garret room in a side street off Covent Garden when the air-raid sirens sounded. Very few Londoners took much notice of such warnings in 1943, as most were false alarms. It was not like the heady days of the Blitz in 1940/41; nowadays, most people just got on with their lives. Even the shows at London theatres continued uninterrupted when the sirens sounded.
When the sirens sounded that night, Peter Hart’s lover just pulled him closer to her, and they perished together as the bomb tore apart the rooming house in which the actress rented a room.
The demise of Major Hart was ill-timed, as it came at the time when British intelligence was starting to reap the benefits of controlling much of Germany’s network of agents in Britain, and careful scrutiny of the enemy’s reaction to the false information that the British were feeding back to the Abwehr was crucial. Such a talented analyst’s loss was annoying, particularly as he was dallying with that damned actress and being adulterous to his wife and young son.
As a result of Hart’s untimely demise and in the interim, Lieutenant-Commander Simon Potts held a watching brief over Section D along with Section A, which he headed. It was a substantial increase in workload, and despite the assurances given by the overall head of MI3, Captain Jeffers, that it would be temporary, by the end of the month, Simon Potts’ stress levels were near to breaking.
‘Good news,’ Jeffers announced to Simon Potts at one of their regular briefings at the start of May 1943. ‘We have found a replacement for Peter Hart and all things being equal, he should be joining us in a couple of weeks.’
‘Really?’ Simon was relieved. ‘Do I know him?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Jeffers was enjoying a momentary teasing of his junior colleague. ‘Alex Carlton is returning to the fold.’
‘Really?’ Simon was seldom repetitive, but he was somewhat taken aback by the news. ‘I thought that Brigadier Swann had vetoed the idea?’
‘Yes, he had,’ the captain confirmed, ‘but he was eventually… shall we say persuaded that we needed the post filled and that Alex’s talents were wasting away babysitting those blasted Russians.’
Simon left the briefing feeling like a weight had lifted from his shoulders. His oldest friend, the man who Simon had inveigled into the service, was rejoining the team, and the smile on Simon’s face proclaimed to the world that he could not have been happier.
Alex rejoined MI3 in the middle of May, and following a pithy welcome by Brigadier Swann, during which the brigadier encouraged Alex to curb his natural tendencies of recklessness, he received a noticeably more cordial reception from Captain Jeffers and Simon. Captain Jeffers introduced Alex to Lieutenant John Harrington, who had been drafted in at short notice to help relieve some of the pressure that Simon was experiencing, and on the face of it, he appeared to be a competent officer who had the considerable benefit of speaking Dutch. Alex was a little concerned how Harrington and Second Officer Daphne Devine would rub along, as both seemed to be vying for the role of his assistant, and it had been almost a condition of Alex’s return that Daphne accompanied him. But there again, Alex reassured himself, Daphne was a resourceful young woman who always managed to carve a niche from which she established her indispensability.
Alex took to his new role with a vigour that surprised Simon Potts and Captain Jeffers. Within a few short weeks, Alex had reorganised the section, and the flow of information was being analysed and recorded far more efficiently. The loopholes that existed during Peter Hart’s stewardship were quickly closed, and the team was now operating far more effectively.
Initially, Alex could not comprehend why the Netherlands’ inclusion in the section dealing with Denmark, Sweden and Norway was logical. To an outsider, it might seem far more reasonable to have the Low Countries in one grouping, but Alex soon appreciated that the mindset of the average Dutchman was much closer to that of a Scandinavian than it was to a Belgian, even though the Flemish half of the country almost spoke the same language. By and large, Alex began to appreciate, Belgium was psychologically and politically much closer to France and Luxembourg than the Netherlands.
*
The next six months brought an increase in Simon and Alex’s workload as the preparations for the invasion of mainland Europe progressed. The intention to keep the Germans guessing from where the attacks would come meant that both sections were busy analysing and quantifying every scrap of intelligence from agents.
The agent’s role in the field was to coordinate resistance activity and ensure that the various resistance organisations would work together to confound and confuse the enemy’s actions and thus aid the invading troops when the invasion came. The leading French resistance group was the Maquis, and they took their orders and direction from General Charles de Gaulle, the mercurial leader of French forces in exile. Nevertheless, despite the frostiness between de Gaulle and the British, the Maquis were more than happy to be supplied and assisted by Britain. Just about every member of the resistance movement was a committed Free French patriot, but there were also communists, socialists or even anarchists eager to ensure that the Germans were evicted from their country. On the one hand, this made Simon’s task simpler, as he could focus assistance to the Maquis, and many agents were sent to France to bolster this organisation; radio operators, explosives experts, saboteurs, organisers, message runners, and coordinators all helped bring the various independent groups together to form a cohesive network of disruption. Countless of these brave agents lost their lives, either by being captured through misfortune or being informed on by Nazi sympathisers.
Alex’s task was far more complex. Not only was he dealing with, primarily, three diverse nation-states, but his efforts were also hampered by the principal resistance group in the Netherlands being communist. Dutch resistance was not as coordinated as that of the French, and in 1943, three main groups were emerging. The Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers (National Organisation for Helping People in Hiding) was by far the most successful, but was a passive resistance group not taken with active resistance; the Raad van Verzet (Council of Resistance) was vehemently anti-fascist, clearly more communist leaning and much more proactive in engaging itself with sabotage and assassinations; the Ordedienst (Order of Service) was preparing for the return of the Dutch government in exile and its members were committed royalists.
In Norway, there w as active resistance and the organisation called Milorg was actively supported by the British. General Otto Ruge commanded Milorg, and although he sought only to engage in activities that would not bring reprisals against Norwegian people, the intelligence that came through this organisation was of the first order. The destruction of the heavy-water plant at Rjukan the year before had been one of the few acts of sabotage carried out in Norway to that point. This was successfully carried out by Norwegian troops sent from England with British supplies. In their endeavours, they were passively assisted by Milorg.
The paradox for Alex was Denmark. As Denmark had never formally declared war on Germany, its resistance was unofficial and not sanctioned by or approved by the Allies. Consequently, Britain’s only formal relationship with the Danish resistance was in intelligence gathering. There were acts of sabotage, but these were sanctioned by the Danmarks Frihedsråd or Danish Freedom Council, comprised of exiled Danes based in Stockholm.
The continuous monitoring of deciphered messages from the occupying forces in continental western-coast countries confirmed that the Germans still believed that the Allies were planning multi-pronged attacks stretching from Norway to Normandy. All indications showed that the ruse, that would become Operation Fortitude, was working well. The American generals Eisenhower and Patton were seen popping up in various places throughout Britain, and Field Marshal Montgomery flitted back and forth throughout the south coast of England, making almost celebrity appearances to seemingly rally the troops.
Hundreds of inflatable or cardboard tanks were commissioned and set in neat rows at strategic points from the Suffolk coast right round to Portland Bill in Dorsetshire, all cleverly covered with camouflage netting that was never quite sufficiently effectual. This camouflage served the twin purposes of partially hiding what was underneath, but that was secondary to keeping what was beneath adequately anchored to the ground to stop the strong winds that blew along the coast from dislodging the inflatables and lightweight cardboard mock-ups and sending them skywards to rain down on the enemy across the Channel.
Troops were engaged in manoeuvring around the coastal areas, changing uniform insignia and truck identification to give any actual enemy spies the impression that the Allies had substantially more soldiers on the ground than they did in reality. The British and Americans even created an entire fictitious army to hoodwink the Germans into believing that an attack on Norway from Scotland was integral to the Allied forces’ plans.
Monitoring the German communications had become more accessible since mid-1941 when cryptologists working under Commander Alastair Denniston at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire had broken the Germans’ Enigma code. Regular communication flashes were made available to MI3 that enabled the formation of a clearer picture of military intelligence, and what was becoming increasingly clear was that not only had the German military in France and the Low Countries been suckered into believing that the Allies had an enormous force ready to invade the continent, but also that the German defensive organisation in these countries was in utter disarray.
It became evident that the command structure was disintegrating. Since the disastrous Dieppe raid in 1942, when an amphibious force of mainly Canadian soldiers landed in northern France near the port of Dieppe, intelligence on the command structure of the German troops had been closely monitored. It became clear that the supposed overall commander-in-chief or Oberbefehlshaber of German forces in the west, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, did not, in fact, have total command of the military in that sector. He had no authority over the Luftwaffe or the Kriegsmarine units in the area; neither did he have any power over Gestapo or Schutzstaffel (SS) operations. Von Rundstedt did not even have total command of his main strike force, Panzergruppe West, as that remained firmly under the control of Hitler himself. He essentially controlled two army groups, B and G; Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel commanded the first (B) in the north, and Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz commanded the other (G) in the south.
Von Rundstedt harangued the Führer, Adolf Hitler, with constant pleas expressing his concern that an uncoordinated command structure left the German defences in France vulnerable to attack and implored Hitler to release troops from Scandinavia, where there was a massive force of eighteen infantry divisions of soldiers stationed in Denmark and Norway, to bolster defences in France.
The flurry of German communications culminated in November 1943 when it became clear that Hitler had issued a directive ordering that there would be ‘staggering consequences’ should the Allies ever gain a foothold in mainland Europe. This directive became the cornerstone for the propaganda term Festung Europa or Fortress Europe – creating a defensive line that would ‘throw the enemy back into the sea’. What von Rundstedt did not get were additional resources. Nevertheless, it became clear that any invasion plans had to be accelerated if they were to occur before the Germans established this defensive line.
All of this happened just when Alex received the news that his wife, Theodora, but universally known as Teddy, was admitted to hospital in Hampshire. The hospital at Netley was not far from where she commanded the all-female pool of ferry pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) based at Hamble. The procedure for which she had been hospitalised was simple enough and had been accomplished without difficulty by a highly skilled surgeon, but the surgery had merely cured the symptom of what was really wrong. Teddy was utterly exhausted and needed time for her body to recuperate, and the following four months involved Alex juggling his time to support his wife with the duties of his office at MI3 – a feat that he accomplished well, but which had not gone unnoticed by those in the intelligence service who had expressed concern over his appointment to such a crucial role as leading Section D.
I
It was during February 1944, only a few days after Alex’s wife, Teddy, resigned her commission in the Air Transport Auxiliary, that a fundamental change happened in German intelligence circles. Until that time, military intelligence for the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht was in the somewhat incapable hands of the Abwehr controlled by Vizemiral Wilhelm Canaris. Reports were starting to come into MI3 suggesting that the Abwehr had been disbanded and replaced by the notorious Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (SD) that had been the construct of the much-hated SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Even though Heydrich had been assassinated by two British-trained Czech agents in Prague two years earlier, the SD survived and became the dominant force in German intelligence circles.
Commanding the SD and replacing Canaris as head of German military intelligence was SS-Oberführer Walter Schellenberg. MI3 became convinced that the somewhat amateurish attempts at military intelligence that had allowed all known German agents operating in the United Kingdom to be controlled by the British intelligence services were about to change, and that it would no longer be so easy to lead the Germans by the nose into trusting some of the outrageously improbable schemes that the British had fed it over the past few years.
In March 1944, Alex was summoned to a conference at a country house to the west of Reading in Berkshire, comprising all senior officers in the security services and the intelligence service who had anything to do with the planned invasion. The American General Eisenhower led the summit, accompanied by Montgomery and several other senior officers. Notable by his absence, though, was the French General Charles de Gaulle.
‘Gentlemen,’ Eisenhower began, ‘Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, will commence on Monday, June 5th, and will see combined troops of the Allied forces attack and invade the Normandy region of France.’
There was a hum of consternation amongst those gathered. Eisenhower continued that German intelligence needed to continue to believe that this was a diversionary attack and that a second force would launch the main attack on the Pas-de-Calais shortly afterwards. From the German perspective, they needed to continue to believe that this second attack would be coordinated simultaneously with the invasion of Denmark and Norway – all of which was illusionary and would never happen. However, the operation’s success depended on the Germans being convinced that the main attack was coming across the English Channel’s narrowest point so that they retained the units committed to defending those areas in place.
