Agent Zigzag

ALL WARS - BUT this war in particular—tend to be seen in mono-chrome: good and evil, winner and loser, champion and coward, loyalist and traitor. For most people, the reality of war is not like that, but rather a monotonous gray of discomforts and compro-mises, with occasional flashes of violent color. War is too messy to . produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of per-fectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in be-tween. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, point-ing to the right path.

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 "There is a well-defined class of people prone to spy mania," wrote Churchill, who was not immune to the mania himself. "War is the heyday of these worthy folk." German spies were spotted everywhere, and nowhere. Police were deluged with reports of strange figures in disguise, lights flash-ing at night, burning haystacks, and paranoid neighbors hearing tapping through the walls. One avid amateur spy catcher reported seeing a man with a "typically Prussian neck." Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked. Anyone and everyone might be a spy. Evelyn Waugh lampooned the frenzy: "Suspect everyone—the vicar, the vil-lage grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here for a hundred years, all the most unlikely people." The spies were said to be spreading newspaper on the ground to give secret signals to air-borne Germans, poisoning chocolate, infiltrating the police, re-cruiting lunatics from asylums to act in a suicide squad, and sending out murderous agents into the British countryside disguised as fe-male hitchhikers. Vast energy and resources was devoted to following up the re-ports, with a complete lack of success. The most grievous outcome of the panic was the internment of twenty-seven thousand Germans, Italians, and other "enemy aliens," most of whom were not only in-nocent, but also strongly opposed to Nazism. The failure to uncover the plotters merely redoubled the conviction that they must be agents of the highest quality. The secret service, wrote an insider, "was left with the very uncomfortable feeling that there must be agents in this country whom it was unable to discover." The simple truth was that apart from Arthur Owens and his band of imaginary Welsh extremists, the Abwehr had utterly failed to recruit an effective team of spies in Britain before the war. But as Operation Sea Lion, the plan for the German invasion of Britain, took shape, the German secret service set about rectifying this fail-ure with a vengeance. From late 1940, as the air duel between the RAF and the Luftwaffe intensified, the Abwehr began pouring agents into Britain: They came by rubber dinghy, U-boat, seaplane, and parachute; they came disguised as refugees and seamen. Some
came armed with the latest wireless transmitters and carefully forged identity documents; others arrived with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in. Between September and November 1940, it is estimated that at least twenty-one Abwehr agents were dis-patched to Britain, with instructions to report on troop movements, identify and sabotage targets vital to British defense, prepare for the imminent invasion, and then mingle with the retreating British army. A list of prominent Britons to be arrested by the Gestapo was drawn up, and at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin there was little doubt that Hitler's storm troopers would soon be marching down Whitehall. The Abwehr spies were a mixed bag. Some were Nazi ideo-logues, but most were the human jetsam that tends to float toward the spy world: opportunists, criminals, and a handful of fantasists. The vast majority of the "invasion spies" had one thing in common, though: They were amateurs. Many spoke English badly, or not at all. Few had received more than rudimentary training. They were poorly briefed and often ignorant of English life. One was arrested after he tried to pay £10 and 6 shillings for a train ticket costing "ten and six." The Abwehr would never find out that its entire espionage pro-gram in Britain had been discovered, dismantled, and turned against it. Many of its agents, it is true, seemed to vanish without a trace, but this was only to be expected. Several had begun sending messages by wireless and secret ink, and a few seemed to be flourish-ing undercover. That, at least, is what Hitler was told. Yet the more professional and experienced German intelligence officers knew that the caliber of spies being sent to Britain was pitifully low. The little information coming out of Britain was low-grade stuff. No sab-otage operation of any note had been carried out. The Abwehr leadership decided that in order to penetrate Britain's intelligence defenses, they would need to look beyond the eager amateurs deployed so far. An altogether superior sort of spy was needed: someone handpicked and properly trained by profes-sionals for a specific, highly dangerous mission. This individual should be dedicated, ruthless, and, if possible, British.