We introduced retired CIA agent RICHARD GAY in KTB #160 and in that issue and KTB #161, he gave some great insights into what took place once the agents from Operation ‘ELSTER’ stepped ashore from U-1230 on the American coast at Maine. In those issues, we read parts I and II of his story – but what happened to Part III? RICHARD had to get clearance from – well, you know where, before he could continue. Here it is, cleared and blessed by the CIA and (I suspect) also the NSA. Part III

The A-bomb Connection

Parts I & II revisited the when, where, and how saboteurs penetrated U.S. homeland security – here is a closer look at why. The WWII German spy landing in Maine was codenamed Operation ELSTER, in English: Magpie. In 1944 every available military resource was put at the disposal of this German intelligence (Abwehr) operation which landed two saboteurs, Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh. Contrary to FBI press releases, and subsequent historic accounts, the mission was manifestly an eleventh-hour attempt to stop the U.S. atomic bomb. Information I have uncovered points to a government laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as the probable target. Sources are skimpy, but the story emerges when you “connect the dots” between the following items, most of which have been heretofore overlooked.

1) Hard copy files at Abwehr Hqs were carefully destroyed prior to capture in 1945, and men like Col. Piekenbrock (Abwehr-I) and Col. Lahousen (Abwehr-II) were disinformation pros. Not unlike the celebrated Tagebuch of former Abwehr chief Adm. Canaris, they all waxed innocent of harmful missions against U.S. targets. In spite of explosive hardware recovered from spies, the Abwehr brass managed to convince everyone that their U.S. sabotage missions were little more than hapless information-seeking boondoggles.

2) Information? It is common knowledge that throughout WWII Germany had more informants in the U.S. than they knew what to do with. No doubt the same is true in England, in spite of the much touted British “Double-Cross” catch-and-switch operations.

EDITOR NOTE – The British claimed that they caught every German agent that came into England and that they ‘turned’ almost all of them. Those few who did not sell out their country and refused to be double agents on the British side were publicly tried and executed, thus intended to give the Abwehr the false sense of security that the other agents were loose and operating. The other agents were ‘turned’ and were giving false information etc. to their home base. The British had a group to oversee this operation and since a slang phrase for turning on your friends was ‘double cross’ and since XX in the Roman numeral system was twenty, this group was known as the ‘Twenty Committee’.

3) Erich Gimpel is on record that his mission was to sabotage the Manhattan Project. Would he have revealed this to the FBI in 1944? And what about Colepaugh? Even though he was Gimpel’s U.S. tour-guide it is not likely that he was privy to details of the Elster mission.

4) The Germans had received a lesson from the British in how to stop an A-bomb project!

5) Gimpel had first-hand experience: he had been on a counter-intelligence assignment in Norway against the British operations that sabotaged Germany’s heavy-water supplies.

6) I found MIT listed on a table of organization of Manhattan Project facilities, and while the National Archives northeast region yielded nothing, I found in MIT’s own Library Archives, references to a government run “Radiation Lab” at MIT during WWII.

7) The fact that a Manhattan Project facility at MIT would be known to German intelligence should come as no surprise. Many scientists had German backgrounds and – as we learned later - they were not above sharing secrets!

8) In June 1944 the Abwehr had a secret meeting at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Aside from its “scholarly ties” with German scientists in the United States, the Institute was the site of Germany’s first atomic reactor - using uranium suspended in heavy-water. It is probable that the ELSTER operation was conceived at this meeting.

9) Was more than one team sent on the ELSTER mission? U-1230 was equipped with a snorkel allowing it to travel long distance without surfacing. A sister sub U-1229 had the same snorkel gear but recklessly cruised on the surface and was spotted and destroyed on August 20, 1944. Among the survivors taken prisoner was the spy Oskar Mantel. U-1229’s objective was to land him in the Gulf of Maine! Was Mantel the only spy on board? Perhaps not.

10) How could the real ELSTER mission have gotten past WWII intel historians? Here’s how:

It was critical to protect the ULTRA source (Enigma decrypts), and probably in some part to protect the Bureau’s image - at which J.E. Hoover was single-handedly adroit. The ELSTER mission was deep-sixed (buried) in secrecy, and the MIT lab was buried in the same crypt. Any files that were not “deleted” in 1945, would be classified by decades of ULTRA secrecy and hard to identify.

11) Prior to their departure for America, both Gimpel & Colepaugh were trained in the latest sabotage hardware and explosives.

12) Contrary to accounts that he was inept and ineffectual (cherchez la disinformation), Gimpel was an electronics engineer and a seasoned spy capable of accessing MIT. As a visiting scientist? Another German accent in the Manhattan Project could hardly draw attention!

13) William Colepaugh, on the other hand, was a defector and an amateur, more liability than asset, except in one area: he was the one person in Germany who could guide Gimpel into MIT, with a bookbag of explosives, in broad daylight. He had been an engineering student at MIT (twice) and on the track team!

14) Relative importance of ELSTER compared to the 1942 U-Boat spy landings at Long Island, codename PASTORIUS. Their kitty was $20,000 per spy, but the ELSTER kitty was $30,000 per spy plus a bag of 100 diamonds! Incidentally, a “sharp-eyed young Coast Guardsman” made FBI headlines for the capture of the eight spies landed on Long Island - but in fact they too were betrayed by one of their own, Georg Dasch. Deja vu all over again? (See Postscript).

15) In the fall of 1944, at that late stage of the war, the German high command was not likely to take a critically needed U-Boat out of service for months for less than a last-ditch mission. Scarcity of U-Boats was due to the Allies ability to read their coded messages. Much has been written and filmed about the exploits of Bletchley Park the English country estate turned crypto-center - but the truth is that Bletchley Park was unable to break the Enigma! BP came into prominence only after receiving from Polish Intelligence a replication of the cipher machine that the Poles had cracked. In addition to this homemade Polish Enigma, components of an enormous computer-like apparatus nicknamed in Polish “bomba” (French: bombe), were exfiltrated via France from Poland to England. Abundant copies were made at Bletchley Park and used throughout the war to recover Enigma keys and rotor changes. ULTRA secret was so guarded that attacks on U-Boats were restricted, in spite of losses of U.S. merchant ships, so the German High Command could not confirm that its highest level messages were being read.

16) The German intelligence service (Abwehr) was not the ineffective coterie of officers that people have been led to believe. It was an enormous and well-staffed organization. A little known fact is that the Abwehr’s communications intelligence COMINT service, B-Dienst, was breaking and reading British naval traffic, which gave them coordinates where our convoys met British escorts – and U-Boat wolf packs. Winston Churchill called for daily Enigma decrypts to read with his morning coffee, but the image of Abwehr chief Adm. Canaris reading British Admiralty traffic with his schnapps is not so palatable.

17) U-1230 radioman Horst Haslau (Member 167-+-1986), also the Enigma machine operator, has revisited the Maine coast. Understandably he avoided mention of sinking the Canadian freighter Cornwallis, just off MDI on December 3rd 1944, but he did disclose privately (I have it on tape) that on arrival U-1230 was warned their “code had been penetrated” and the U.S. Navy was waiting at the designated landing site. The sub’s skipper was ordered to use his own judgment for an alternate site. Frenchman Bay was probably chosen because:

a) the mountains of Acadia were a prominent landfall; and
b) their charts of Frenchman Bay dated back to cruise liners, such as Germany’s Crown Princess Cecilia of WWI fame, and were probably better than ours. U-1230 would have continued to receive broadcasts from Hqs on assigned schedules while maintaining radio silence. Since they knew their presence here was compromised, sinking the Cornwallis may well have been an attempt to screen U.S. intelligence from the real mission.

18) Last but not least are primary sources. By sheer coincidence, my uncle Dr. Karl Larsen of Bangor, Maine, was a physicist at the MIT lab. He has recounted how his work on the electro-magnetic spectrum of heavy water, was a prerequisite for the first U.S. atomic bomb. In November 2001 I found William Colepaugh living quietly in a senior’s residential complex. I reminded him by phone that had he not given up Gimpel to the FBI, my uncle would have been toast (dead). This softened him to the point of giving me his mailing address, which I already had.

19) During an hour-long phone call from USA Today in February 2002, I compared events of Nov.1944 and Sep.2001, including the fact that Colepaugh, a U.S. citizen, was tried in a closed military tribunal. I refused to give up Colepaugh’s whereabouts, and did not share the fact that he was in military uniform in Germany and en route in the U-Boat; or that he was armed, as was Gimpel, with U.S. weapons – Colt .32 pistols. One wonders what may have happened had not Mrs. Mary Forni stopped on the deserted road to Hancock Point that wintry night on the Maine coast.

EDITOR NOTE – Mrs. Mary Forni was a lady who spotted the two agents headed down the road after they came ashore from the U-Boat. She said that they were dressed quite fancy and did not fit the fisherman image of the area.

20) Wartime news releases, then as now, may of necessity be charged with disinformation, but I have no plans to seek FBI clarification – they are busy enough these days with current events! On the other hand, while ULTRA is history, this collateral info, obscure and stale as it is, may help recover additional code groups, on the Russian VENONA decrypts, relating to the Manhattan Project, Cambridge, and MIT.

Postscript

Harvard Hodgkins of Hancock, the young Boy Scout and later graduate of the Maine Maritime Academy, and the young Coast Guardsman from Long Island, while not responsible for the spies capture, gained an equally important place in U.S. history. Their role was crucial in the FBI’s successful diversion effort to protect ULTRA - the Top Secret COMINT source which in November 1944 was providing Allied Hqs with real-time intelligence - including daily tactical orders from Hitler’s Hqs to his generals in the battlefields across Europe, a source without which the story of WWII would surely have had a different ending. As a former Boy Scout, Korean War veteran, and Cold War spy, I take my hat off to both these young patriots. Readers please note: I am a former CIA and NSA operations officer, however no information in these articles is from official sources, none of it is classified, and the conclusions drawn are all my own.

Thanks DICK. We look forward to more…..from Another Spook.

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