In KTB #160 last month, we introduced RICHARD GAY, another of our Members from the ‘Spook’ community and he has made a great study of some major actions of WW II - actions that are either entirely unknown to the general public or at least, critical parts of the stories have not been made public. RICHARD, and our other ‘Spooks’ in Membership, fill in the gaps.

Hancock Point Spies (part II)

Following my article on U-1230 Operation ELSTER from the last KTB, there have been a number of phone calls requesting more details. Here is more background and a few words about spying, then and now. As most of you know, during World War II, the United States and Germany were in a race to develop new weaponry.

Top priority projects included:

(1) Jet planes
(2) Rocket missiles, and
(3) An atomic bomb.

Germany won in races 1 and 2, albeit weeks, maybe days, too late to affect the war’s outcome. In race #3 we were neck and neck, and German intelligence was only too aware that the U.S. project, codenamed MANHATTAN was close to producing a bomb. Both sides knew that the substance deuterium oxide, aka heavy water, was essential to build the bomb. No heavy water, no bomb. The Manhattan Project’s research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) was developing heavy water.

In the summer of 1944, the Abwehr, Germany’s intelligence agency, gave top priority to an espionage operation, codenamed ELSTER, which eventually landed two spies at Hancock Point. It was a last-ditch effort to sabotage the U.S. atom bomb. The German Air Force was nearly wiped out and there was not enough aviation fuel to fly what planes were left. Many former Luftwaffe pilots, including Hans Hilbig the skipper of U-1230, were shifted to the submarine corps replacing high losses in U-Boat crews.

EDITOR NOTE - Capt. HILBIG is Member #186-1986

The Allies had a communications intelligence (COMINT) weapon codenamed ULTRA that allowed them to decrypt U-Boat messages and know their locations. A great deal has been written about breaking the Enigma cipher machine at Bletchley Park, the English country estate turned crypto-center, but the Enigma was actually cracked by a Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski, and components of the first computer-like machine used to recover rotor key changes were brought from Poland to Bletchley Park. Similarly, not until declassification by NSA of The Story of Magic (1998) was the record set straight on who broke the Japanese PURPLE, the diplomatic code that revealed the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. An NSA building is now named for Frank Rowlett the man who broke PURPLE. He also invented the U.S. Military Sigaba machine, which was never broken. Another little known fact is that Germany’s crypto-center B-Dienst was breaking and reading British naval traffic in the North Atlantic, which in turn gave Admiral Dönitz the locations of our own convoys!

Last year a U.S. association of former intelligence officers, of which I am on the national committee, initiated a project to commemorate espionage sites in New England with historic plaques. I proposed the WW2 Hancock Point spy landing. The only other nomination was in Connecticut for Col. Benjamin Tallmadge, one of George Washington’s secret operatives. My proposal calls for a plaque to be placed in view across the harbor from Hancock Point at a scenic turnout in Acadia National Park. The plaque would be in the form of a display panel, similar to two others at the site describing the bay and early French explorers. I set out to learn all the facts I could about our WW2 spy affair in order to “get it right” on a request to the U.S. Department of Interior for permission to use Park property. In Nov. 2001 I submitted the results for publication in the association’s news bulletin, and later sent copies to the newsletters of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) retirees associations. Local Maine newspapers followed the story and in January 2002, it made the Associated Press, albeit mostly headlines and little substance.

A New Alphabet?

Anyone “in the business” might tell you with tongue in cheek that spying is never quite what it seems. This is only too true. The tradecraft of the spy, Espion in French and Spion in German, hence the term espionage or clandestine operations, includes intelligence collection, counterintelligence (CI) and covert action (CA), not to be confused with cryptanalysis (CA), all of which is conducted surreptitiously against hostile governments and their military, intelligence, and security services. And in recent years, to support counter narcotics (CN) and counter terrorism (CT) operations.

Professional spies have been called masters of deceit and their working environment a “hall of mirrors.” The picturesque coast of Maine is no exception. Ask any five people from coastal communities about their “German spies” and you might get five different stories. Things are further complicated by the fact that no matter whose side you are on, American, German or Russian there are rules which say you do not reveal sensitive “sources and methods” ever. And even includes the five decades since WW2.

The submarine which brought the spies across the Atlantic was a type IX-C/40 U-Boat, reportedly carrying a crew of 56 men, average age 22. One of the crew, radioman Horst Haslau, while revisiting the area, was a guest speaker at the local Rotary Club. Mr. Haslau was never a spy yet he managed to avoid, if not discretely alter, old secrets and sensitive issues, including radio contacts, and the sinking of the CORNWALLIS. Radioman Haslau, who was 17 in Nov.1944, passed away in Apr.1999.

EDITOR NOTE - HORST HASLAU was Member #167-1986

In the spying business, any info collected from radio communications is labeled COMINT for “communications intelligence.” Here is a brief, and unclassified, lesson on the jargon of high-tech spying. There are two basic categories of intel. Collection - HUMINT and TECHINT, for human and technical intelligence. The latter is broken down into three main sources:

1. SIGINT “signals intelligence” which includes COMINT;
2. IMINT “imagery intelligence” which includes satellite images;
3. MASINT “measures and signatures intelligence” such as the infrared “signature” of a departing aircraft.

There are a dozen or more INTs, but remember this: if SIGINT is like hearing, and IMINT like sight, then MASINT is like touch, taste, and smell! The other major category is HUMINT, involving humans variously called spies, operations officers, case officers, operatives, agents, assets, sources, informants, observers, spooks. In the U.S. intelligence community (IC) the flagship of HUMINT is the CIA, where case officers generally “run” foreign agents, although special situations require special operations.

During WW2 the German navy, like all other navies, used a secret overlay grid on their Atlantic charts to report their locations. I believe, from seeing a copy of an old German navy photograph, that the entrance to Frenchman Bay was in grid square BA9050, and Hancock Point in BA9030. Here is a spot quiz! Questions:

(1) Is this grid info IMINT or HUMINT?
(2) Does the info's age, e.g., 57 years, make it JUNKINT?
(3) If radioman Haslau handed you a copy of U-1230's transmissions is it HUMINT or COMINT?

Answers will be at the end of this article.

Researching the World War II spy affair yielded no shortage of what you may call RUMINT. One rumor, almost believable, had the real spies arriving across the harbor at Lamoine Beach while the Hancock Point duo was merely a decoy! Dow’s Taxi stand was at Tracy’s Restaurant, an all-night eatery on Main Street. Off-season visitors to Hancock Point summer estates then, as today, would not be unusual for a taxi service. Taxi driver Forest Polley was returning from another fare, probably to Winter Harbor, a regular destination because of the busy Navy Base.

Gimpel and Colepaugh were resting at the old Hancock village watering fountain beside Route One - and little wonder after two months in a cramped submarine followed by a four mile hike in a snowstorm with all their luggage. Who would suspect a young visitor from Connecticut whose car had broken down?

Ironically, it was not a Boy Scout whom Erich Gimpel saw that night on the Hancock Point Road, but it was a housewife. Mrs. Mary Forni was not called to testify at the military court marshal. Gimpel’s one chance at seeing Mary was behind the glare of her headlights at night in a snowstorm. Without a little humor, HUMINT (no pun intended) can be mostly stress, so I asked Gimpel if he'd like a “retrial.” In his book Spion für Deutschland the events of 1944-45 are somewhat fictionalized, but Gimpel's account is an accurate glimpse into a spy's daily emotional challenges. Aside from the Maine hunting season dress-code bungle, Gimpel’s lapse of tradecraft procedure was his failure to “disappear” after Colepaugh’s desertion. Cherchez la femme?

EDITOR NOTE - our friend ERICH GIMPLE (884-LIFE-1988) had been known to ‘throw caution to the wind’ more than once when there was a pretty girl around. He is indeed fortunate to have survived his spy activities in the War. All too often, either his own Abwehr or the ‘other side’ would be close to catching him in an ‘unusual’ activity for a spy, but he got out of the noose each time - a lot like the movie spy James Bond.

Last year my Civil Air Patrol (CAP) unit celebrated the 60th anniversary of CAP. During World War II the CAP made over a hundred U-Boat sightings and a number of “bombing” attacks. During daylight hours U.S. coastal waters were dangerous territory for U-Boats, but at night they surfaced, deep inside coastal patrols and radar, to recharge their batteries. Local residents may remember the muffled sound of heavy diesels running at night out in the harbor. U-1230 was still nearby four days after the spies were landed, and on Dec. 3rd sank the freighter CORNWALLIS just off MDI. It was a Canadian ship bound for Saint John, New Brunswick, not a U.S. vessel as may have been alleged later to use against Gimpel at the military trial. Was Gimpel's layover in Boston Nov. 30th in order to scope-out the port and commence short wave transmissions from the hotel room? Very unlikely. Spying on shipping was not even a remote collateral function of his primary mission, and it is not likely Gimpel would have risked such reckless exposure. Were there perhaps Fifth Column agents in Maine? I tend to believe there were, but I have collected more than enough info for the historic plaque.

One cannot avoid comparing events of Nov. 1944 and Sep. 2001.

A. American homeland security was penetrated by an underwater craft in 1944, an aircraft in 2001.
B. Two saboteurs took the train in 1944, a plane in 2001, from Portland to Boston, to New York.
C. An American defected to Germany in WW II and in 2001, to the Taliban. Both later provided useful info on the Nazis after WW II and on Al Qaida in 2001.
D. The spies were both convicted by a closed military trial. Sound familiar?

Did collaborator Colepaugh die in prison as reported in the press? One must assume that his information carried some weight with the authorities. He would now be an 84 year old senior citizen with the same rights as the rest of us, including the right to privacy. If Gimpel had infiltrated the MIT laboratory posing as a “German scientist”, my uncle and others would have been toast. Spying at best is a tricky business. The bottom line? William Curtis Colepaugh may have saved the Manhattan Project, and single-handedly changed the ending of World War II. In closing I will offer a line from Erich Gimpel:

“The whole of America had been warned of the danger of spies and saboteurs...but after six months, then a year and then two years no one took spy warnings seriously any more.”

Answers to the quiz

1. Is this grid information IMINT or HUMINT? It is HUMINT.

2. Does the info’s age, e.g. 57 years, make it JUNKINT? No, the grid info could be the missing link to some mystery U-boat carrying Nazis or gold.

3. If radioman Horst Haslau handed you a copy of the radio transmissions from U-1230, is it HUMING or COMINT? It is HUMINT. The ‘INT’ refers to the method of collections. Hand to hand is HUMINT.

How did YOU do on this test? We hope you are enjoying all this information ……from Another Spook. RICHARD will be sending more intel secrets for more editions of our KTB on a regular basis. And to you other Members from the Intel community - please start sending your memories. Let’s tear away the curtain of all the popular but incorrect misinformation and disinformation on the various parts of World War II. Thanks in advance.

More U-1230 Spies

U-1230 SPIES – Part I KTB 160
U-1230 SPIES – Part II KTB 161
U-1230 SPIES – Part III KTB 166