Better Axis Espionage and Intelligence

When Rommel's intelligence man got himself captured, the SIGINT fell away for Rommel. That was a part of his ability to predict what would happen and was suddenly gone.

Rommel apparantly also transmitted in the open, but before British forces could do anything about it, he was on the move.

It was interesting how Canaris in perhaps his most inspired plan of the war I discussed a bit earlier allowed Rommel replace his original American intelligence source with a bunch of intelligence women who were at times even better at getting real time intelligence about British plans and their current thinking about the war to Rommel. The thing is the British in breaking the Axis codes were sinking Italian ships right and left by that point as they knew each time Italian supply ships left port so the Axis supplies were drying up big time, thus Allied intelligence in Africa ended up being more decisive.

But, still this was the only theater of the war where Axis intelligence operations were very well planned throughout the war and close to on par in terms of effectiveness with Allied intelligence in the theater. The British in a lot of ways were very lucky that Germany didn't make a far bigger investment in the Mediterranean campaign after France fell because it very well might have paid off.

General Fellers was the US liaison with the British in North Africa. Over his objections, he was instructed to use the US diplomatic Black code to transmit messages to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Unfortunately, that code was stolen and copied by the Italians from the US Embassy in Italy in September of 1941, prior to the US entry into the war. As a result, Rommel’s staff read every word Fellers sent back to Washington before Washington read it. When Fellers was replaced in July of 1942, his replacement was permitted to switch his communications to US military cyphers. The Germans could no longer decipher the intercepted transmissions.

They turned to an Egyptian belly dancer for help. In the spring of 1942, a team of elite German commandos set out from Libya in US military vehicles captured from the British. Their goal was to infiltrate two Abwher agents, Johannes Eppler and his radio operator Hans Sandstede, into Egypt. Eppler had a German mother and an Egyptian father and had spent most of his childhood in Alexandria and Cairo. He was well-trained and well-prepared for an operation in Egypt. After a grueling fifteen day trip through the desert, Eppler and Sandstede were dropped near the British Egyptian rail station at Asyut, Egypt.

The German spies made their way to Cairo where they used well forged documents and high quality counterfeit British cash to rent a house boat and set up operations. The crux of Eppler’s plans came down to one roll of the dice. He contacted an ex-girlfriend by the name of Hekmet Fahmy. In 1942, Fahmy was the most popular belly dancer in Egypt. She had access to the best night clubs and parties attended by the elite of local British and Egyptian society. She was the most alluring female celebrity in that country and enjoyed popularity with dance fans across Europe. She was also trusted in the highest military and social circles.

Fahmy recruited other popular belly dancers to assist Eppler, allowing him to operate one of the most successful honey traps of all time. British officers and government officials mistakenly trusted Fahmy and foolishly revealed critical information. As Fahmy’s guests slept in her arms, Eppler searched their personal effects. By keeping track of which British officers from which regiments frequented the clubs, the Germans determined when particular units were being dispatched to the front.

In some cases, British officers and civilians revealed more detailed classified information that was then transmitted to Rommel’s headquarters. In effect, the Germans replaced an American general with an Egyptian belly dancer.

Thanks to the continued flow of high grade intelligence, the Desert Fox confounded British attacks with timely delaying actions and skillful withdrawals. Rommel’s tanks were outnumbered by now, but he could continually place them and their accompanying 77 millimeter anti-tank guns in ideal locations to deal with British movements.

After a few months of operations in Cairo, the British pushed back the Afrika Korps from El Alamein. Communications with Rommel’s headquarters became difficult. Eppler sought out the Egyptian Free Officer Corps, who were anti-British, to request assistance with passing information to Rommel. The young Egyptian officer who agreed to help was the future president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.

http://piperbayard.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/booty-spy-hekmet-fahmy-the-fox-behind-the-desert-fox/

In fact Rommel's quick lunge toward Egypt was influenced by the reports he was getting from the belly dancers that the British were in a panic in Cairo after the fall of Tobruk and there was real talk going on of leaving Egypt for Palestine if the Afrika Korps couldn't be stopped in Eastern Egypt.

It was dealt with if I recall in the 1959 West German movie Rommel ruft Kairo. I think the back and forth intelligence war in Africa would make for a good modern Hollywood spy thriller... it certainly has lots of sex appeal, war and high stakes involved and its actually a true story.

8489AEEEF63049F0B8F87EB783E7834D_1-002238.jpg
 
Last edited:
This is a rather clever operation: Insofar as Britain had penetrated Germany fairly well with its intelligence oprations, Stalin chose to penetrate British intelligence to gain everything that Britain learned. That was probably a better way than trying to infiltrate German operations himself.

Except the Sooviets did also infiltrate Germany. Remember the Lucy Ring? Red Orchestra? And those spies brought intelligence gold mines to Stalin even the British never found out.
 
The Italians are not inferior at all, this is the people who produced Da Vinci, Palladio, Machiavelli, Garibaldi etc. However the Italian Fascists were spectacularly useless, so while it's not a surprise that generic Italians managed to have a better Intelligence service than generic Germans it is a surprise that the Italian Fascists managed.

Don't forget pizza as well! Damn that is by far one of the best inventions of all time!

-----------------------------------

On topic.

Remember that going into WWII the Allies were so scared that the Nazis had already infiltrated their ranks completely, and this became the incentive to develop a sophisticated intelligence network.

The reason they thought this, was that they believed it impossible that Poland and France could have fallen so quickly without enemy agents reporting on allied movements and pre-sabotaging allied military operations before the Germans would arrive.

These 'fifth columnists' never existed at all.

However, the allies thought they did, and that ended up on the Allies making special attention to try and root out all sympathises in Britain and watch so carefully for enemy agents. In the dark days of 1940, there was a total fear of Nazi infiltrators parachuting in the dark of night and so on.

This fear was made even worse by the fact that the British were not intercepting enemy agents, leading the Allies to think that the Abwehr were so good that their efforts were no where near good enough.

It was only later as they did begin to pick up German agents and made them double agents, like the infamous agent Eddie "Zigzag" Chapman that did they realise that the Abwehr was almost totally incompetent and could be infiltrated fully.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman


-----------------------------------------

Had Nazi Germany had those 'fifth columnists' and a functioning intelligence agency it is likely that these 'agents in the dark' would have actually transpired and Britain may have had to weather sabotage attacks as well as bombings.

The major outcome being massive public hysteria at anyone vaguely Germanic or suspicious and many more innocent civilians may have been imprisoned or killed as 'traitors and spies' than were. It would have also likely led to instances of extreme persecution which might have hurt British reputation, particularly if Nazis could publicise such events at Nuremberg, perhaps stirring up an awkward position for the allies in the post war era.

But who truely knows...? The butterflies are many.
 
In my opinion German Blitzkrieg wouldn´t have succeeded the way it did in 1939-1941 without a decent intelligence gathering. They had some successful "coups" (Polish intelligence files on soviet union, and the Venlo incident comes to mind), but most of the intelligence must have been gathered by air reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and prisoner interrogations. If the Germans would have lacked the tactical intelligence they needed, we could see that from the results, because they would have failed as early as 1940 in France.

The British work on ULTRA machine is well known, since they boasted so much about it. But also Soviets broke the Enigma codes, so maybe it wasn´t such a unique thing. In fact, I think it´s quite normal in warfare, that codes are broken from time to time. Someone mentioned the Finnish code breaking efforts, and the fact that they broke 80 % of soviet division and corps level codes during their attack phase, so that should give us some idea of ease of breaking Soviet codes. Finland was, after all an agricultural society, and while the Germans might not have shared their own code-breaking results with a minor satellite state, they at least had much much higher scientific base in their country for such thing as code breaking. I don´t think, there has been so much discussion about German signals intelligence, except that Rommel had so good signals intelligence officer, that the British were compelled to attack his post and try to capture him alive. Probably he was not the only good signals intelligence officer in German army.

I think the results speak for themselves, and they tell, that Germans were able to overcome stronger armies and enemies up until 1942, when USA joined the war, and the economic output started to be so badly against the Germans, that they couldn´t win. I have never heard, that intelligence failures would have been "the bottle neck" of German Blitzkrieg. Battle of Britain was a strategic campaign, LW was not suited of, in Crete the British commander didn´t (even) believe the ULTRA reports, and in Barbarossa the problems were in weather and logistics. Failure in Kursk can be attributed to Hitlers delays, and later failures to Allied air superiority and industrial output.
 
Someone mentioned the Finnish code breaking efforts, and the fact that they broke 80 % of soviet division and corps level codes during their attack phase, so that should give us some idea of ease of breaking Soviet codes. Finland was, after all an agricultural society, and while the Germans might not have shared their own code-breaking results with a minor satellite state, they at least had much much higher scientific base in their country for such thing as code breaking.

The success of Finnish radio intelligence is first and foremost up to one exceptional individual, the previously mentioned Hallamaa, who really created the whole system and led it from 1927 to 1945. A hugely resourceful organizer and a capable mathematician, Hallamaa had gone into the business of intercepting and deciphering Soviet radio messages already in 1920 as a young conscript. In the 20s and 30s he built his organization from the ground up, managing to convince the higher-ups of the value of his work through practical success. During the 30s he received a scholarship to study intelligence issues and build a network of contacts around Europe. As to the maths thing, he studied for a while in Vienna with Herbert Feigl, a known mathematician and a member of the so-called Vienna Circle.

Hallamaa lobbied his cause endlessly with ministers and presidents and recruited a staff of mathematicians and experts on the Russian language. Some were White Russian emigrants and all exhibited special talents. One of his main cryptanalysts, Erkki Pale, later for example created the Finnish system of social security numbers.

All during the war, Hallamaa pursued a policy of exchanging the fruits of his work for more resources and equipment, new radios and various electronic necessaria, from neutrals like Sweden and of course the Germans. That way a lot of the broken Soviet codes were passed on to the Swedish, for example. With new resources also from the state the organization grew from just 75 people in 1939 to over 1000 in 1944. A pretty high number for a country the size of Finland, one should think - did Germany, proportionally speaking, have 15 000 people just intercepting and deciphering Soviet radio traffic in 1944?

This is all to say that for one thing, one exceptional individual can have a major effect on the development of intelligence systems for a small, young country. For another thing, it might be somewhat disingenious to belittle the the chances of a small "agricultural" country to make a better showing than a major nation in a specific field of intelligence, even of highly technical nature, given the possibility such individuals do exist and given support by the military and political leadership they might well achieve results that seem disproportionately good for the ostensible base and resources of their nation. Let us not remember, too, that Finland hardly was a backward nation even in 1939, and Hallamaa was able to recruit a competent staff for his scheme, one that had received the required university-level mathematic, linguistic and/or technical education.

It would be a leap, therefore, to say that the Finnish success had anything to do with how "easy" breaking Soviet codes was. Rather one could say that it proves Soviet codes were readily breakable given time, dedication, ability and a necessary level of resources.

EDIT: A declassified 1946 US Army Security Agency report on "European Axis Signal Intelligence in WWII" can be found here in .pdf form. I skimmed it a bit and while certainly lacking in terms of later academic research it seems to give a good view on how the Americans saw the issue just after the war.

There is a brief and partly unreliable section about the Finnish efforts. It includes this, though:

Germans, interrogated by TICOM on the subject of Finnish cryptanalysis unanimously agreed that the Finnish cryptanalysts were of the highest calibre and considered them an even match for their own analysts.
 
Last edited:
.. yes, sorry. Lucy and Red Orchestra and other things (Sorge) were absolutely not insignificant. I didn't mean to ovelook that.

I do believe that Britain's intelligence community was ahead of Soviet penetration of Germany at that time, but that is debatable of course. If that was so, then this is smart. Sorry, it didn't exactly come out clearly.

Insofar as Britain and Soviet were supposed to be allied, it might have been less risky as well.

Ivan
 
Top