3.
4.
In November 1938, D.S.T., which is the French M.I.5, wanted to open an English make of safe in a certain embassy in Paris. Special Branch brought Ossie out of Parkhurst and asked him to go there.
‘With the Nicks to help you,’ said Ossie incredulously, and volunteered like a shot. He got on all right with D.S.T. and they kept him for nearly four months. Ossie’s value to them came from his knowledge of British safes, which several of the embassies in Paris then had. Now of course any embassy in its right mind uses only safes made in its own country. However, back before the war Ossie earned himself a quite nice French civil medal, but some bureaucrat in the Home Office prevented its award.
Ossie has always been a very thorough worker, and often he would take a London office and register a firm at Bush House in order to write and inquire about the sort of safe he intended to crack. Once or twice he even bought and installed the same model to practise on. Perhaps this isn’t so extraordinary these days, but in the thirties it was really scientific crime.
It was in April 1939 that D.S.T. borrowed Ossie again. This time, without telling London what they intended (and very wise, too, for the Home Office would have gone out of their small minds), they sent Ossie to live in Berlin. Big expense account and an apartment in a beautiful block of flats in the Bayerischer Platz. All Ossie had to do was to study the literature of the safe manufacturers. Sometimes they would go to one of the showrooms to look at the real thing. When war began, Paris and London were fighting over Ossie and he spent the war years travelling around the world cracking safes for various Allied Intelligence organizations. All this experience meant that Ossie had made many important friends ‘across the grain’, as they say in Intelligence work; that is to say, he was a link between many separate organizations.
In the normal way of operations, such people disappear when their usefulness is past. Ossie’s influence was now great, and because of his friends he survived those fatal years for agents, 1945–8. Ossie had been back in prison several times since the war, even though the F.O. generally sent some tame V.C. along to the court to speak about his war record in what was ironically described as ‘the Resistance’. In the post-war world of Intelligence Ossie had become a specialist on documents. Common crime was no longer for him; he got secret documents out of safes. The document business was booming. He would ‘do’ an aeroplane factory for the Yugoslav Embassy or the Yugoslav Embassy for an aeroplane factory. Ossie didn’t play favourites among clients. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ he once told me. By now Ossie could read enough of a dozen languages to ensure that he wouldn’t bring the wrong documents back. He had also studied photography at L.C.C. evening classes.
The idea of producing counterfeit banknotes (?5, ?10, ?20, ?50) in order to shake confidence in British currency is said to have been inspired by the dropping of forged clothing-and food-coupons by the R.A.F. over Nazi Germany. The original plan (to drop the notes from Luftwaffe aircraft) was named Operation Andreas but later was replaced by Operation Bernhard. This latter plan was to use the money to finance secret operations.
The notes produced at Oranienburg Concentration Camp (Special Wing 19) were used to:
Buy arms from Balkan partisans (so making them less dangerous).
Finance Hungarian radio-listening service.
Buy information concerning Mussolini’s whereabouts (in order to arrange rescue).
Pay Cicero (?300,000).
Supply presents for Arab sheiks.
In the latter stages of the war the production centre was moved to Ebensee and to an underground factory near the village of Redl-Zipf (between Salzburg and Linz). A young S.S. lieutenant moving a consignment of the currency (and some people say the plates too) is in a difficult position when one of the lorries breaks down. Acting on orders, he tips the packing cases into the River Traun and hands the broken lorry over to the Wehrmacht. After a little distance a second lorry breaks down; it is abandoned.
When British currency comes floating down the Traun to the Traunsee Lake the U.S. Army, who are by now in occupation, investigate the second lorry. In it they find ?21 million in virtually perfect forgeries. It is accepted that the remaining lorries went to the German Naval Research Station (homing torpedoes were tested in the lake).
The sides of the lake are steep, and investigation of it rendered dangerous by a raft of waterlogged timber that hangs suspended about 100 feet below the surface of the water. Divers do not dare to go under it.
In March 1946 two bodies are found near by. Both men had been stationed at the Naval Research Station. In August 1950, another death: again an ex-member of the Naval Research Station.
Many people thought that the sites of these deaths indicated that the plates were hidden in the heights above the station rather than in the water. Rumours said that the Russians organized these attempts, but there is nothing to connect them with either.
In 1953 the
Operation Bernhard was run by the S.D. (Sicherheitsdienst), the S.S. Security and Intelligence Unit which evoked much jealousy among the other Nazi intelligence units for its extravagant access to so much finance.
The
Invented by German Navy during World War 2. The original device enabled a semi-skilled operator to send high-speed signals (these could be read and decoded only by means of recording gear, it was far too fast for a human ear to interpret). The dials are set to
The front page said ‘Court Martial’ and then a list of contents. First the report of the Court of Inquiry that had repatriated this officer from Germany. Under that was the Circumstantial Letter (a report about the need for a court martial). Then there was a list of witnesses, warrant for holding the court, statements by the accused, and a batch of pencilled shorthand originals.
‘Traitorously holding correspondence with the enemy (Germany) … having traitorously given intelligence to the enemy … traitorously given information to the enemy.’ The difference between those was too subtle for me. I read on, ‘having been made a prisoner of war he voluntarily aided the enemy by joining and working for an organization controlled by the enemy and known as the British Free Corps … failing to report his arrest to the C.O. of the establishment where he was born for pay as directed by Naval Pay Regulations Article 1085.’
The white spaces in the dossier had diagonal blue ink-lines across them to prevent insertions. As I read on, the scene came alive. The first winter after the war, the assembly hall with its kitchen tables covered with naval blankets, the senior officers in their shiny buttons, the accused in a newly issued uniform; Bernard Thomas Peterson, a volunteer reserve officer captured by the Germans during ‘human torpedo’ attacks on the Norwegian coast in 1943. The prosecution called as first witness Lt James who, as a member of the S.I.B. (Special Investigation Branch) attached to 3 °Corps, arrested Peterson in Hanover on 8 May (V.E. Day). Lt James said that an order issued by the Montgomery H.Q. on 6 May made the use of German transport illegal. Acting on information received by phone, Lt James and two S.I.B. sergeants went to an address in suburban Hanover and there found
