Tag: Spies

On a British Spy

I love a good British spy story. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of my favorite films for this reason. There’s something about the spycraft of it all, the casual business-like calm, the, well, Britishness of spying that makes those types of stories interesting to me. Take the story of one such spy recruited by Britain during World War I.

Many people don’t know that the British Government spy agency, commonly known as MI-5 (short for Military Intelligence, Section 5) got its start before World War 1, in 1909. Britain could read the tea leaves, so to speak, and knew that war with the aggressive regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Germany was going to happen sometime in the near future. Therefore, the British planned ahead. MI-5 was set up to identify and monitor possible German spy activity in Britain in the buildup to the war. The head of the agency, a General Vernon Kell (known only in the agency as “K,” of course), also knew that, when war came, it would be vital to have British agents in the nations that could help Britain win the war. So, he planned to plant British spies in nations like Romania (whose king was a relative of Britain’s George V, as were most European monarchs), Denmark, and Italy.

Italy was especially important to Britain because of their large navy in the Mediterranean Sea and the fact that they bordered Austria-Hungary on their eastern side, a nation that most assuredly would side with Germany during the war. And General Kell sought out Italians who weren’t in the miliary to be his spies; he felt that people with “normal” jobs would draw less attention in their intelligence gathering than would people who would be obvious candidates for spying. On the other hand, the occupation of these people should give them access to people, places, and events that would prove to be valuable sources of information if and when the need arose. Teachers made good spies. Transportation administrators did as well. Art dealers, book publishers, and reporters were also on the list.

Thus, one of the spies MI-5 supported during World War I in Italy was a journalist. In his capacity as a British agent, this guy could not only have access to important people but he would also be able to help sway public opinion in favor of the Allied cause. Of the several dozen spies in Italy during the war, this one was a particularly good investment. Records show the man was paid well by the British every week to provide information and also help mold the opinions of the Italian people into supporting the Allies. In fact, payments made to this journalist at the time equaled about $8,000 per week in today’s money.

As Italy’s government began fighting for the Allies, the work this spy performed made a difference in keeping Italian morale up and providing actionable information for his minders. As the war ended in November, 1918, the need for such spies also ended. Kell saw MI-5’s budget cut drastically after the war, going from hundreds of staff members to only a handful. However, the onrush of World War II brought the agency it back to life as the original Axis of Evil (Germany, Japan, and Italy) threatened the world.

Of course, Italy’s threat to Britain in the 1930s might not have been so great had it not been for the rise of the Black Shirts of the Fascist Party in the 1920s. And you know the man who led that political movement, right?

The same journalist the British paid so well to be a spy during the previous war: Benito Mussolini.

On a Spy’s Code

Espionage and sending coded messages is as old as man, almost. The old joke that when God made the third human that a plot was hatched by two of them against the other one has some validity. And finding a way to confidentially pass information gleaned by secrecy became an important part of how to successfully carry out any plot. We know about cyphers, about dead drops, about messages in symbols, and even numbers stations. We’ve talked about some spies in this format (Mata Hari, for example), but this is about a particular spy code in World War 2 that came from an unlikely source.

Sometimes, and especially in this day of high tech, the more low tech a message is, the more secure it can be. That is the case here. The spy in question was a British agent named Phyllis. She had been dropped into Nazi occupied northern France in the weeks and months before the Allied forces invaded Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Phyllis’s job was the blend into the countryside, to watch German troop movements, listen to local gossip regarding defenses as she sat knitting with the other women, and sometimes flirting with the occupying soldiers in an effort to glean more vital info that could make the difference between success and failure of the impending invasion.

One harrowing experience came when she and some other women were brought into the local police station for questioning. Their movements and activities had aroused the Nazi’s suspicions, and the women were thoroughly searched for any possible evidence that would implicate them in espionage activities. A female policewoman made the women strip to search their clothes for any potential messages or proof of spying. The policewoman noticed that Phyllis had her hair tied up on the top of her head with one of her crocheted pieces, and she insisted that Phyllis take her hair down in case something had been hidden there. Phyllis quickly complied, and she revealed that nothing was in her hair bun. Telling the story years later, Phyllis recalled how scared she was, how terrifying the situation had been, and how the Nazis actually came to finding the information that she indeed had hidden in her hair.

Except the coded messages wasn’t in her hair. It was in the crocheting. In fact, the kitting the Phyllis and the other women did in Normandy contained codes in the knots and the loops and knits and purls within the kitted piece. She used the knitted items to send coded messages about the German defenses to people who had hidden radios, and that’s how the Allies knew which areas of Normandy would be the best to invade in that late spring of 1944.

Yes, one of the best weapons the Allies had in the invasion of Europe was a pair of kitting needles.