Andrew Jeffrey - A Taste for Treason

Dr Andrew Jeffrey studied at the University of St Andrews and has written widely on military and maritime history. He has authored a trilogy of books on Scotlands role in the Second World War and his media work has included research and on-air contributions for British, Dutch and French documentaries. Glasgow-born, Dr Jeffrey is a former sea fisherman, Royal Navy reservist and RNLI lifeboatman.

First published in 2022 by

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Copyright Andrew Jeffrey 2022

The moral right of Andrew Jeffrey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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ISBN 978 1 78027 788 2
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78885 527 3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf, S.p.A.

Contents

The greatest peacetime spy ring in history

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

Go ahead, investigate the cocksuckers!

US Secretary of State Cordell Hull to J. Edgar Hoover

There is no doubt whatever that Jordan is a member of the German espionage organisation at Hamburg

MI5, January 1938

Intercept has created a tremendous impression in the Deuxime Bureau and French naval circles

MI5, October 1938

Movie exposes work of Hitler stooges in U.S. Chicago Tribune on Confessions of a Nazi Spy, May 1939

TOULON NAVAL ARSENAL, FRANCE, 6 MARCH 1939

They came for him in the still, silent hour before dawn.

Capitaine de vaisseau Pouech woke the young officer and said, Aubert, votre recours en grce est rejet. Habillez vous. Cest lheure de la penitence. (Aubert, your appeal for mercy has been rejected. Get dressed. It is time for repentance.)

Enseigne Marc Aubert had spent the seven weeks since his court martial refusing to wash or shave and shouting rambling confessions at the drab, indifferent walls of his cell. It had been the madness of the condemned. But the new day would bring atonement and, resigned to his fate, he heard Mass, gave naval chaplain labb Fabre a last letter for his mother and waited, chain-smoking, until the escort arrived.

Normally a hive of activity even at that early hour, Toulon Naval Dockyard was eerily quiet that fine spring morning. Gendarmes patrolled the streets to keep the morbidly curious away while, beneath the walls of Fort Malbousquet, 700 soldiers and marines had formed up in silent, serried ranks around a wooden post backed by a bank of earth. A truck drew up and Aubert was escorted towards the post. He stopped briefly to embrace the priest, then waited patiently while an officer read the sentence of the court martial.

.. . la peine de mort par fusillade (the penalty of death by shooting).

The German military intelligence service Abwehrs top spy in France for more than a year, Auberts treachery had gone undetected until an American Nazi agents letter, intercepted in Scotland, triggered an international spy hunt. Among those identified by MI5 and

The Japanese had marched into the Nationalist Chinese capital, Nanjing, in December 1937 and massacred perhaps as many as 200,000 Chinese civilians in six weeks. As the rest of the world looked on, unable or unwilling to intervene, more than 20,000 women and girls were brutally gang-raped, pregnant women had foetuses torn from their bodies and babies were skewered on swords. To place the depraved Rape of Nanjing in perspective, British civilian deaths for the entire six years of the Second World War totalled 67,000, a third of the Chinese civilian death toll at Nanjing. And, in an alarming portent of what was to come, British and American river gunboats evacuating Western civilians were deliberately targeted by marauding Japanese aircraft. One, USS Panay, was sunk.

In Africa, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had unleashed 100,000 troops and deadly clouds of chemical weapons on defenceless Ethiopia. Here, as in Nanjing, thousands of women were raped, hospitals were bombed and, in one three-day killing spree following an attempt on the life of an Italian general, around 6,000 Ethiopian men, women and children were shot, bayoneted or burned alive. In all, some 275,000 Ethiopians died as Mussolini pursued his ridiculous quest for a latter-day Roman Empire. The rest of the world, indifferent to the fate of a few thousand black Africans, paid no heed as deposed Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie warned, It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.

As if to bear out Haile Selassies grim prediction, a deadly miasma of ferocious small wars was already spreading across Europe. The Spanish Civil War was plumbing new depths of bestial savagery as the militarist right and hitherto pacifist left from around the world weighed into a bloody proxy war that would cost more than half a million lives before the fascists, ably assisted by Nazi Germany, claimed victory in 1939. Britain and France contented themselves with pointless moralising from the sidelines, then professed weary surprise when it transpired that nobody was listening.

Taking his cue from the feeble international response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler had reoccupied the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938. Six months later, in a rabble-rousing tirade at a Nazi rally, he demanded that Czechoslovakia evacuate the disputed Sudetenland border region within days or face invasion. Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe units were heading for the Czechoslovak border, German terrorists were murdering Czechoslovak policemen, the Red Army was massing on Polands eastern border, the French, Romanians, Yugoslavs and Hungarians were all mobilising, Italy had ordered all Jews out of the country and air-raid drills were being rehearsed in London and Paris.

It was abundantly clear to all but the most wilfully myopic that Hitler was an amoral, racist thug at the head of a militarist cult hell-bent on, at the very least, continental domination. Yet, having colluded in the destruction of Czechoslovakia at Munich in September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain boasted, albeit while accelerating British rearmament, of peace for our time. French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, a more astute judge of Hitlers character than Chamberlain, entertained no such conceit and returned to Paris wretched at having danced to the British appeasement tune. Dont have any illusions, he said, this is only a respite, and if we dont make use of it, we will all be shot. As Daladier recognised, Hitler was unappeasable and Munich had merely delayed the inevitable.

This was the fraught background against which the hunt for the French naval officer spy Charles began. And it was a search that assumed even greater urgency when the British intercept on the Dublin agents mail revealed that Charles was handing his delighted Abwehr spymasters a treasure trove of French naval ciphers, blueprints and technical reports. Anglo-French strategy for a sea war against Germany and Italy was being comprehensively betrayed and the vital Mediterranean route to Suez and the Middle East oilfields was in jeopardy. Even the mobilisation orders issued to the French Mediterranean Fleet during the September 1938 Munich Crisis were in German hands, decrypted, almost as soon as they reached their intended recipients. By then, however, the MI5 intercept had yielded the vital clue that would lead the Deuxime Bureau to enseigne de vaisseau Marc Aubert.