Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

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      The willingness of MI5 to go along with this process of detaining and transporting – kidnapping, in all but name – individuals, despite its original lack of legal authority to do so, is all the more striking when the heavyweight legal brains it employed during the war are considered. One of the B-Division officers centrally involved in detaining and transporting enemy agents to Camp 020 was H.L.A. (Herbert) Hart, an Oxford academic lawyer who went on to become one of the most eminent legal philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. On one level, it is surprising that ideas of ‘natural justice’ and ‘fairness’ did not prevent lawyers working in MI5 – a large number of whom were wartime recruits from the Law Society – from supporting such legally dubious practices as detention without trial. On another level, however, it is less surprising than it may seem. H.L.A. Hart is most famous for his ideas of legal positivism, which, put crudely, argue that there is not necessarily an inherent association between the validity of laws and ethics or morality, and that laws are made by human beings. The thrust of legal positivism is therefore that laws are essentially malleable.⁵⁵

      One cannot help concluding that MI5’s wartime lawyers (in both its legal section and its counter-espionage division) were willing to overlook the weighty ethical and moral issues raised by detaining and transporting enemy agents, so long as the formality of ‘ad hoc’ emergency legislation was in place and all the other legal niceties were fulfilled. This narrow focus on formality, rather than substance, is a characteristic as common among some lawyers today as it apparently was then. Furthermore, it is notable that prior to the passing of ‘ad hoc’ emergency legislation, neither H.L.A. Hart nor MI5’s legal advisers, including several future High Court judges, nor the Colonial or Foreign Offices’ legal advisers, could find any legal justification for the detention and transportation of foreign nationals without due process – which is striking given the allegations of ‘extraordinary rendition’ today, because it allegedly involves exactly the same matters, but the law requiring due process is no different now from what it was during the Second World War.

      It is impossible to state with certainty how many enemy agents were transported from British colonies to Camp 020 for interrogation during the war. At least twenty-three such agents can be identified in declassified MI5 records, though the true number may be considerably more. Whatever it was, many of the cases were highly dramatic, while others bordered on farce. One of the most important involved an Argentinean national of German descent, Osmar Hellmuth, who worked in the Argentine consulate in Barcelona, and who in September 1943 was identified as acting as a courier between the officially neutral Argentine government and the Third Reich. Working under diplomatic cover, Hellmuth’s mission was to travel to Germany, where he was to meet the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and possibly even Hitler, and purchase arms and other equipment for the Argentine government, which from June 1943 was ruled by a military junta led by General Pedro Pablo Ramírez. Hellmuth’s high-level mission made a mockery of the claims by General Ramírez that the Argentine government remained neutral in the war.

      The tip-off about Hellmuth’s mission to Nazi Germany came from the SIS head of station in Buenos Aires, who forwarded it to SIS’s headquarters at the Broadway Buildings in London, where it was received by none other than Kim Philby, then working on the Iberian desk of Section V (counter-espionage), based in St Albans, just outside London. Philby passed the information on to MI5 – as he probably also did to his KGB masters. SIS and MI5 together orchestrated a detailed plan for Hellmuth’s detention and transfer to Britain, which was put into effect the following month, October 1943, when Hellmuth set sail from South America to Spain. As soon as his ship touched British soil en route, at Trinidad in the West Indies, MI5’s DSO there arranged for him to be arrested by local police. This was authorised at the highest level, by the British Governor of Trinidad, who signed Hellmuth’s arrest and detention order under the newly enacted ‘ad hoc’ legislation – though in fact it was clearly in violation of Hellmuth’s diplomatic status. Hellmuth was put on a waiting British seaplane that flew him to Bermuda, and from there he was transported on board a Royal Navy cruiser, the Ajax, to England, where he arrived in early November.

      After his installation at Camp 020, MI5 interrogators set to work on him, and he was quickly broken. He revealed an array of highly explosive diplomatic information, producing letters written with secret ink, giving up the identities of senior Nazi intelligence officials, such as Siegfried (or Sigmund) Becker, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst mission in Argentina, and disclosing that the Argentine Minister of War, the future President Juan Perón, was involved in the Nazi arms deal. Hellmuth also confessed that part of his mission to Germany had been to contact the notorious Nazi espionage chief Walter Schellenberg, the head of the SS’s foreign intelligence department and later head of Section VI (foreign espionage) of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA). With duelling scars on his cheeks, a signet ring stashed with cyanide, and a desk in his Berlin office mounted with machine guns which could spray the room with bullets at the flick of a switch, Schellenberg was very much the stereotype of an arch villain.⁵⁶

      The information produced by MI5’s interrogation of Hellmuth at Camp 020 was of such massive diplomatic importance that the British government decided to go public with it and expose the duplicity of the Argentine government. This caused a sensation, with General Ramírez being forced publicly to disavow Hellmuth. As the post-war history of Camp 020 noted, the Hellmuth case forced Argentina to sever diplomatic relations with the Third Reich, and helped to precipitate the collapse of the Ramírez government. It also had repercussions in Nazi Germany itself, with Himmler blaming the head of the Abwehr, Canaris, for the chaos it caused and demanding Canaris’s resignation.

      Other Axis agents were also arrested when they landed in Trinidad, and transported to Camp 020. This happened with the German agent Juan Lecube – a former footballer, greyhound-owner and ex-Spanish civil servant – and also with Leopold Hirsch, who was arrested on board the Cabo de Hornos in Trinidad harbour after his identity was revealed when his name was given en clair in a German telegram intercepted by Bletchley Park. The case of Gastäo de Freitas Ferraz is a striking example of how seizing an agent at sea saved Allied lives. De Freitas was a wireless operator on a Portuguese fishing depot ship, who was recruited by the Abwehr to provide maritime intelligence under the neutral cover provided by his Portuguese employment. However, while his ship was en route from Newfoundland to Lisbon in October 1942, he was arrested and removed first to Gibraltar then to Camp 020. At the point when he was arrested on the high seas, his ship was on the tail of a convoy taking part in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. De Freitas was interrogated at Camp 020, confessed and was detained for the duration of the war. If he had not been kidnapped, it is almost certain that he would have seen the invasion convoy taking part in Torch and reported it by radio, which would have had disastrous consequences for the Allies. His arrest seems to have saved the Allied invasion of North Africa.⁵⁷

      Perhaps the most bizarre wartime rendition case was that of Alfredo Manna, an Italian agent operating in the neutral territory of Portuguese South Africa (present-day Mozambique). Manna was one of a number of agents run by the Italian Consul, Umberto Campini, in Lourenço Marques (today the city of Maputo), whose mission was primarily to report on Allied shipping movements off the coast of East Africa. It is unclear how British intelligence identified Manna: it may have been from an Ultra decrypt, or it may have been the result of good old-fashioned detective work on the part of the local SIS representative stationed in Lourenço Marques, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. Nevertheless, by early 1943, MI5 and SIS, sensing that he was far from loyal to his Italian masters, hoped to turn Manna into a double agent. Muggeridge worked closely with a local SOE team to devise an elaborate plan, ‘along the best Hollywood lines’, as he later put it, to detain Manna and transport him to Britain for interrogation. According to Muggeridge, a devout Catholic and future biographer of Mother Teresa, the plan was essentially to ‘kidnap’ him. Knowing that Manna’s great weakness was women, Muggeridge hired an exotic casino dancer named Anna Levy to lure him to the border of British territory in Swaziland. As the later history of Camp 020 noted: ‘There he was seized, gagged and bound СКАЧАТЬ