El Hatto: The agent who never was.

 

Intelligence can have multiple meanings. To the military it means gathering and interpretation of information, whilst to some of us it refers to imagination modified by logic. This tale combines both; working to the same end.

From 1939 onwards the Germans and Italians maintained a series of ship-watching stations around the strait. For the first two years it was a hit and miss sort of organisation, generally found unreliable by its masters. So in late 1941 the Germans decided on a technical solution. They installed three infra-red searchlights in Morocco, just west of Perejil Island, looking north. Three receivers facing south were mounted on the Spanish shore. In theory, ships breaking the beam would be detected by this infra-red burglar alarm… but it just didn’t work… another vorsprung would be needed.  

  

The British Admiralty could have told them; in the late 30s, a similar system had been tried across the entrance to UK harbours. Even over these much shorter distances, the layer of disturbed air above the sea surface and reflections from the waves – which the Admiralty termed twinkling – rendered the system inoperable.

 So the Germans inverted their thinking. Instead of transmitting infra-red, they would collect it. Ships gave off quite large amounts of IR radiation, principally from their funnels, so a ship might be detected by its IR signature. The apparatus used to recognise this IR was a Bolometer, a device consisting of a large reflector collecting radiant heat and using it to change the electrical resistance of a sensor, whose reference was a reservoir of quite a large mass with a constant temperature. A step change in the resistance would occur when a step change in the received IR was detected… ie. when a hot funnel went past. Unfortunately - for the Allies - this worked only too well, but they didn’t know it existed until February 1942.  

 In late 1941, the British Radio Security Service began to intercept Enigma coded radio signals from a new station, GGG, in Algeciras. They were duly referred to Bletchley who were able to de-crypt them using Ultra. The signals contained references to something named Operation Bodden and were of technical nature. The information was forwarded to SOE stations at Madrid, Gibraltar and Tangier.  It coincided with reports of Spanish beach front properties being purchased by known German intermediaries and the arrival of technical equipment at Tangiers. The previously Tangiers International Zone had been seized by Franco’s troops in 1940 and Germans were observed there, dressed in Spanish uniforms. By February 1942, the Secret Intelligence Service scientist, RV Jones, had put it all together, deciding it was most likely that the Germans were assembling either a system of IR searchlights or detectors, or both. To confirm what was happening on the ground the RAF ran photo-reconnaissance sorties pinpointing the various sites and of course the SOE - as always - wanted to blow them up.

 

          

       RV Jones, aged just 28 was the Principal Scientific Officer at SIS.

 

The Navy would have to be informed. Planning was underway for Operation Torch, which would involve a large number of vessels transiting the strait. An officer from the Navy’s Directorate of Scientific Research was shown the evidence on which RV Jones had based his conclusions. He was not told that the source was cryptographic; Ultra was so secret that its existence was closely guarded. Unfortunately, the First Sea Lord overlooked security considerations and passed down to the officer some of the raw cryptographic material.  This highly conscientious officer thought it was all wrong that such material, in his hands, should not be made available to his superior officers. He could not be convinced that the First Lord had made an indiscretion and that the matter was so secret it must not be revealed. So an alternative type of intelligence had to be employed.

 The officer was told that SIS had been telling the First Sea Lord a cock-and-bull story about cryptography, because the German codes hadn’t been broken at all. What they had done was to infiltrate an agent into the German Secret Service headquarters in Madrid, whose position was so delicate that they dare not tell even the First Sea Lord… which is why they made up the cryptographic story. The messages he had been shown were stolen from the Abwehr office. The officer was offered a full account, in the form of a report, which he could show to his superiors, as long as it was kept within a very small circle of personnel. The report was provided as shown:

 

           “German Equipment for Ship Detection in the Straits of Gibraltar.”

 “The information upon which this Report is based has been gathered by the SIS through three separate channels: (A) Our agent network operating in the Straits area. (B) The technical investigations of Mr DJ Garrard, (C) The reports of our El Hatto source who has fairly frequent access to German HQ in Madrid and whose duties with the German SIS enable him to visit outstations from time to time. Since much of the evidence depends upon the reports of this last source, it may be mentioned that although he is non-technical, he has reported faithfully on even more important subjects than the present and there is a good deal of internal confirmation in his statements. The other agents in the Straits area have not the same penetration and can only be relied upon for grosser details such as positions of activity and the passage of large items of equipment.”

 That did the trick, for the officer had found something to justify his suspicions of SIS reticence, even though he was appalled that they had misled the First Sea Lord. The irony of this story is that of naming the source as El Hatto when Hatto was indeed the name of one of the men at Bletchley Park who was handling the Abwehr decodes. (Professor AT Hatto, Dept. of German at Queen Mary College)

  The Navy were quite keen on bombardment, but was determined that blowing up the sites was more likely to drive Franco further into his embrace with the Nazis and that a diplomatic solution would have to be sought. That solution was  achieved by Sir Samuel Hoare, British Ambassador to Madrid, who when briefed by SIS, confronted Franco with evidence from the strait (carefully avoiding content acquired by Ultra or any clues to its existence) and accused him of assisting the Germans and supplying them with material in breach of his position of neutrality.  It was suggested that petrol supplies to Spain would be cut off on any suspicion of supplying the same to the Germans. (In fact the Allies knew he was refuelling U-boats in Cadiz and the Canaries.) Eventually Franco told Admiral Canaris that the sites would have to be dismantled… and they were. However, that did not stop the Germans rebuilding them elsewhere at a later date, but for the time being it was a success. 

           

        

                                                                                 Ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare.

First published at Gibraltar History Society Chronicle December 2023.    Paul Hodkinson.