Allied Military Deception
- Thread starter Julian
- Start date
Well, it didn't help that Canaris's Abwehr was actively subverting the Nazi war effort at what seems like every turn.
Indeed, I can remember seeing a television programme a number of years back about how film prop departments were involved with the intelligence services to supply agents with things. For clothes they'd track down tailors from the country they were sending people to and get them to make their clothing in the proper local style, then get the prop people to artificially age them and the other possessions they'd be taking like suitcases so that they'd look normal.
Not entirely. There were a number of German sucesses. The Abwehr station in Netherlands suceeded in penetrating the British Soe operations in Holland & northern Belgium. Virtually every SOE agent sent to the Netherlands from mid 1941 through 1942 was intercepted & Abwehr substitutes sucessfully put up for a portion of them. The Abwehr used its false agents to guide in a steady stream of new SOE agents, weapons, radio equipment, code books, gold coins and paper currency, ect... it took the SOE leaders some 18 months to catch on their netherlands operations were a complete fraud. Even after the evidence became pleantiful some leaders in the SOE had trouble believing their sucessful 'Dutch' operation had been so badly compromised.
Another sucess was the pentration of the AT3 "scambled" telephone link between London & Washinton DC. This system was installed by American Telephone & Telegraph in 1941 to provide a secure telephone linke between the two capitols. it was mostly used by senior staff to sort out urgent questions on the plans and messages sent by courier or encrypted radio & telegraph. Churchill also liked to use it for personnal conversations with his representatives in Washinton Like Marshal Dill or with President Roosevelt.
German signal intellegence specialists succeeded in intercepting the AT3 traffic from late 1941 & listened in to the spring of 1943 when a major change to the system shut them out. Hitler received translated transcripts of the conversations between Churchill & Roosevelt with back ground notes within 48 hours of each conversation.
Not all German agents in Allied occupied territories were rounded up. Several continued to operate in Africa, & Italy to 1945. Farrago when researching Abwehr records in the US Army archives found copies of radio messages from a German spy in New York City that ran all the way to April 1945. This agent sent weekly summaries of ship arrivals & departures & oterh miscl information he gleaned from around the city.
Cook
Banned
That is not always the case. In November 1939 the Abwehr very quickly discovered the Allied plan to send an expeditionary force to Scandinavia, ostensibly to aid Finland against the Soviet Union but in reality to seize the northern Norwegian port of Narvik and the Swedish Iron Ore mines supplying Germany. They also accurately reported when this plan was cancelled. The subsequent German invasion of Denmark and Norway came as a complete surprise to the allies, while the Germans were aware that the British were planning to lay mines in Norwegian waters on the same night the Germans chose to launch their attack.
By May 1940, ‘Foreign Armies West’, the Wehrmacht’s intelligence section responsible for the gathering and analysis of information on the Dutch, Belgian, British and French armies, knew where almost the entire Allied field armies were deployed. They also how few forces the French army was holding back in reserve and how weak those reserve units were. The Anglo-French advance was entirely predictable from their prepositioning on the Franco-Belgian border and the German plan of attack was designed accordingly.
In North Africa both sides signals intelligence services were able to regularly obtain good tactical and operational level intelligence on the enemy. The Germans definitely had the better half of the deal in this respect for most of the first two years of the campaign though, certainly Operation Crusader in November – December 1941 would have benefitted enormously from better operational security and Rommel, despite being severely outnumbered, was able to put that benefit to maximum use.
So the claim that the Allies consistently outmatched the Abwehr and SD can only be made with any credibility for the second half of the war, not the first.
Sort of like the the Luftwafe from 1941. Spectacular tactical victories, but a declining operational track record & stratigically failing.
Wrong, The BBC did not report V-bomb impacts, except the most destructive and important.
The Germans got their V-weapon impact data from an agent in Britain, Spaniard Juan Pujol Garcia.
Pujol Garcia was actually a double agent working for British intelligence, with the code name GARBO. He had previously served as a major channel for the FORTITUDE deception (that the Allies would invade France around Calais).
Through GARBO, the British sent misleading impact data. The techniques for V-1 and V-2 data were different, but in both cases the goal was to get the Germans to miscalibrate their missiles, so they would fall short. The deception was successful, and the "mean point of impact" for both weapons moved well away from central London to less populous areas to the east and southeast.
GARBO was highly regarded by the Germans, and received the Iron Cross 2nd Class. He was also made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
(The Germans did not rely exclusively on GARBO's reports. There was an SS-Wehrgeologen detachment which tried to locate the impacts by seismic data, and they also got reports from a couple of neutral diplomats.)