Wulf Dietrich Christian Schmidt, later known as Harry Williamson (7 December 1911 – 19 October 1992) was a Danish citizen who during World War II became a double agent working for Britain against Nazi Germany under the codename Tate. He was part of the Double Cross System, under which all German agents in Britain were controlled by MI5 (British counter-intelligence) and used to deceive Germany. Nigel West singled him out as “one of the seven spies who changed the world.
On 8 September the first V-2 rocket landed on British soil. Unlike the V1, which could be shot down in the air, the V-2 was more or less immune from air defences of the day. When launched, the rocket would hurtle up into the air and then, on the edges of space, flip over and begin its descent. It would plummet down on its target faster than the speed of sound, delivering a payload of 2150lb of high explosive. It was only after impact that survivors would hear the sound of something like an express train hurtling towards them as the V-2’s sonic boom caught up.
In terms of potential for harm, the V-2 was clearly a bigger threat than the V1. Initial estimates speculated that the V-2s might kill as many as 100,000 people a month, and steps had therefore been taken to evacuate London and the seat of government if necessary. Confidentially Guy Liddell told Tommy Robertson that there was a secret plan to threaten Hitler with atomic retaliation if the V-2 was deployed as a weapon. In fact, the V-2 proved somewhat less of a problem than feared. Although they were deadly to those in the vicinity of their blast, compared to the number of bombs being dropped on German cities, the amount of explosive carried by the V-2s was modest. In addition, the suddenness with which the weapon struck was perhaps less psychologically troubling than the sound of the V1 ‘Doodlebugs’ spluttering by and then suddenly cutting out as they fell to earth.
Initially the V-2s were fired from extreme range and mostly fell in East Anglia. However, by the end of October, the launch sites had been moved closer to the front line and began to find their range, landing on London. Unable to carry out air reconnaissance of the damage, the Germans again relied on their agents to provide information that would allow them to correct their aim. This reopened the whole debate about what information to provide the Germans, and if the agents’ reports should be used to divert the rockets from striking central London. On 9 November the Twenty Committee wondered if they should not implement a deception similar to the one proposed for the V1. This meant locking horns with the politicians again, and officially the request was turned down. Official policy was that the agents should send only the bare essential information to maintain their cases, and nothing more.
It was odd, then, that the fall of the bombs began to creep eastward. Again the Twenty Committee decided (or was secretly authorized) to implement the deception in the face of official disapproval. Montagu admitted that the Twenty Committee’s mandate on the V-2 deception was phrased very vaguely ‘for political reasons’. It was decided that the agents should mix the location of incidents where the rockets landed in central London with the time of those falling 5 to 8 miles short.
Of the agents available to implement this deception, Zigzag might have been the obvious choice, but he had unfortunately had to be sacked in November. When Zigzag’s case officer Ronnie Reed was transferred as a liaison officer in France he was replaced by Michael Ryde, a former RSLO for the Reading area. Ryde and Zigzag took an instant, mutual dislike to one another and Ryde almost at once began trying to have the case shut down so he could be rid of his charge.
Despite the best efforts of Masterman and Robertson to iron out some of Zigzag’s excesses, it was only a question of time before Ryde got his way. The first problem was the revelation that Zigzag had told his girlfriend Dagmar the truth about working for the British; then there was his continued attachment to von Groening, his German case officer. The planned meeting to provide Brutus with money and a camera had then collapsed because Brutus’s German case officer would not cooperate, declaring Zigzag unreliable. The final nail in the coffin came when Chapman began drifting back into criminal circles. Ryde believed that the spy had told his underworld drinking companions the truth of his existence and the source of his money. If this was the case, Robertson had no choice but to agree to cut him loose: Zigzag was just too unpredictable. He was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and was threatened with retaliation if he ever told anyone about his secret service. Of course, true to form he started touting his story to publishers and journalists almost straight away!
Of course, Zigzag had never been a key player in B1a’s stable of deception agents. His departure was more than compensated for by the arrival of a new double cross agent codenamed Rover. This was a young Polish sailor and one-time professional boxer who had been captured by the Nazis and subjected to forced labour in Hamburg. As a way out of this unpleasant occupation, he joined the German secret service and agreed to go to Britain as a spy. He was well trained in Morse and instructed in how to build his own wireless transmitter set once he arrived. Rover reached Gibraltar via Spain and came clean to the authorities. They sent him on to England, where he arrived in May 1944 and was put to work as a double cross agent.
Unfortunately the Germans did not return his calls and so Rover was handed over to the Polish Navy. Almost as soon as his services had been dispensed with, the Germans began trying to call him. Rather than bring Rover back and have to explain everything to the Poles, B1a decided to use a substitute. The Germans did not notice the change and from 9 October the British secret service had yet another means with which to bamboozle their opponents.
Before returning to the V-2 deception, a disaster befell the man imitating Rover. He fell ill, was packed off to hospital and promptly died. By this time the V-2 offensive was in full swing and Rover was considered the best source on the subject after Tate. A second substitute was found, who tried to imitate the style of the previous substitute. The match was not perfect, but an excuse was developed to cover this. Rover reported that he had been off the air because he had been in hospital. He claimed to have been hit by a lorry during the black out and had sustained damaged ribs and a broken shoulder, which made tapping out Morse messages difficult. It appears this incapacity was accepted as a valid reason for the subtle change in Morse style and the Rover channel was allowed to continue.
The main trusted source on V-2s was Tate. Before D-Day B1a had been unsure how favourably Tate was viewed by the Germans. There had been so many near misses with the potential to blow the case that B1a wondered if the Germans believed he had been blown, or was simply out of favour. However, once the invasion took place, Tate’s importance was confirmed when his German case officer told him that his messages were so important they might ‘even decide the outcome of the war’.
At a Twenty Committee meeting on 18 January, Masterman pointed out that the Germans appeared to paying an awful lot of attention to the reports of Tate and Rover regarding V-2 hits. At the next meeting, a week later, Masterman pointed out that the V-2 MPI was shifting and this was probably down to the two agents deceiving the Germans. A few weeks later, Masterman believed that from 20 January to 17 February the MPI had moved eastward by two miles a week and had ended up outside the boundary of London altogether. Strangely, none of Tate’s V-2 reports have survived in British files, and none were thought to have survived on the German side. However, what did become certain at the end of the war was that the Germans plotted the majority of their hits fairly centrally in the middle of the capital. In fact the majority of the hits were east of the River Lea, and north of the River Thames in the districts of East and West Ham, Leyton, Barking and Ilford. Again by the actions of the agents, Londoners were spared another probable 11,000 killed or maimed – unofficially or not.
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Perhaps more important than his work with the V-2s, Tate’s biggest contribution to deception was the last successful project of the Twenty Committee.
The steady flow of ships bringing supplies from Britain and America into mainland Europe proved an irresistible target for German U-boats. Even with the Allies knocking on the borders of Germany, the outcome of the war was still not guaranteed, as the German Ardennes offensive in December proved. If German U-boat attacks continued and the flow of supply ships and troop transporters was disrupted, the Allied advance might be forced to halt. Escort vessels were overstretched with the increase in shipping since June 1944 and the Germans had introduced technical innovations to their submarines. Previously, German submarines had been forced to surface to take on fresh air and recharge their batteries. Vulnerable to detection and attack from the surface, the Germans designed a device called a schnorkel, which allowed the submarine to perform these maintenance actions while still submerged. This allowed U-boat crews to sit in busy Allied shipping lanes, submerged and undetected, waiting to pounce.
British Naval Intelligence was extremely puzzled as to how the Germans managed safely to navigate through the treacherous shallows around the south west of the British Isles. Without surfacing they were unable to follow the standard practice of determining a fix on their position from the stars, or by tuning in to land-based radio transmitters. Head of the Admiralty’s U-boat Tracking Room, Captain Rodger Winn, believed that the Germans were using depth sounders to pilot their way along a certain part of the seabed south of the Irish coast. Close to the Fastnet Rock, the contours of the sea floor were so unique that it was relatively easy for German captains to follow and gave them an accurate fix of their position prior to entering the Irish Sea.
The obvious answer would have been to sow this part of the ocean floor with mines. Unfortunately for Winn, the only available mine-laying ships were too busy in the Channel protecting the supply route to Normandy. Previously dismissive of deception, Winn swallowed his pride and asked Ewen Montagu if he could find a way to stop the Germans from getting their positional fixes. The obvious choice of double agent for Montagu was Tate. The Dane had already been set up with a notional girlfriend, Mary, seconded to the American Naval HQ in London’s Grosvenor Square. Still flush with cash from Plan Midas, Tate was able to purchase hard-to-come-by booze on the black market and held parties for Mary’s colleagues.
After one of these imaginary parties, Tate explained how one naval officer had had one too many drinks at the flat. The officer served on board HMS Plover, a mine-layer. He indiscreetly boasted that the Allies were going to bag themselves a lot of U-boats from a new minefield they had just laid. The officer was not specific about where this new minefield was, describing it as being ‘south of Ireland in a place where they go to fix their position when they’re snorting [the British term for a U-boat using a schnorkel]’. It was hoped this off-hand description would be all too obvious to German Naval Intelligence.
As with so much else, the British were able to gauge the success of this deception through Bletchley Park. On 1 January 1945 the Germans ordered all their U-boats to steer clear of the area. Several other messages were intercepted to the same effect, but it was unclear if the Germans believed there was a minefield, or were merely remarking that this was a possibility. At this point Lady Luck played her hand. A German U-boat crew was washed up on the southern Irish coast, having scuttled its sub after striking a deep sea mine. Although the U-boat had obviously not hit Tate’s imaginary minefield, the point at which it was scuttled was in the right area to suggest that this might be the case. Naval Intelligence was quite sure that the U-boat crew had not made a distress signal or sent word of their plight, so it was decided that Tate would use the incident to reinforce his earlier deception. He made contact with his controller, and in one of his blistering communiqués claimed he felt like giving up spying. The British naval officer had recently stayed at the flat after a night out celebrating sinking a U-boat in the new minefield. Tate asked his controllers what was the point in him taking risks to gather and send intelligence if he was going to be ignored.
This had the desired effect. On 13 March Bletchley Park deciphered a message confirming Tate’s minefield. All U-boats were ordered to avoid an area some 3,600 square miles wide, or, if they found themselves there, to proceed at a depth of less than ten fathoms if they blundered into it. Thus a safe route for Allied shipping was opened, and the German crews were pushed out into deeper waters that were genuinely mined. Tate was confirmed as a loyal German spy, remaining in contact with his controllers until 2 May 1945, the same day German forces in Berlin surrendered to the Russians.
