Here is the author DICK GAY on assignment. Take a good look at this photo, as there is a contest going on about this photo. [For Sharkhunter members only. See the www.sharkhunters.com website to join. --RL]

Here is part IV of this story by former Spook (CIA), DICK GAY and he has formerly secret information you’ll find nowhere else but from Sharkhunters. This installment is a little late in part, because DICK had to clear it with the CIA. But now – here is Part IV.

Here is another installment of the Abwehr/SS operation ELSTER that penetrated U.S. homeland security, inserting Erich Gimpel and William “Billy” Colepaugh into the East Coast by way of Maine. On 29 Nov.1944 between 10:30 and 11:00pm Gimpel and Colepaugh came ashore at a local picnic spot named “Sunset Ledge” by the summer resort village of Hancock Point in Frenchman Bay not far from Bar Harbor, Maine. After an unsuccessful attempt using a pull line from their rubber boat back to the sub, they were rowed ashore by crewmen Fritz and Konrad.

If my guess is right, these two were the only enemy in uniform to set foot on U.S. soil in the 20th century, excluding Alaska which was not yet a state, and Poncho Villas raiders who were irregulars out of uniform. The able skipper of U-1230, former Luftwaffe pilot Hans Hilbig, had navigated the submarine into the mouth of Frenchman Bay within hailing distance of a U.S. Navy radio and direction-finding station on the end of Schoodic Point.

EDITOR NOTE – HANS HILBIG is Member #186-1986

Infiltrating the bay at periscope depth, he passed downrange of a quad-40mm inshore battery in front of a Navy substation overlooking the bay at Bar Harbor. Navigating to the upper limits of the bay, nearly 14 miles from open water, he surfaced to wintergarten depth, swung the big IXC/40 around and eased her stern first into the tidal mouth of Skillings River. Why stern-first? So he could gun the boat forward if grounded; and so the wintergarten was facing the shore: the sub’s AAA machineguns were manned to cover the landing!

The next day Nov 30th was the last day of Maine deer-hunting season, rifles were cleaned and oiled, and local hunters were early to bed. Were any illegal night-hunters out prowling? God forbid. Imagine the racket, with 20mm and 37mm ack-ack fire echoing across the bay, if there had been trouble on the beach! By the way, on the way into the bay U-1230 passed one of the Porcupine Islands that was used not only as a gunnery target for the quad-40, but also as a live torpedo target. Did I mention that U-1230 spent the daylight hours of Nov 29th on the bottom of Frenchman Bay a few hundred yards off the Bar Harbor Naval Air Station runway? Just as the deep-water bay with its high spruce-clad islands served as cover for French frigates centuries earlier, it served U-1230 as shelter from airborne radar and coastal patrols. Here is a little piece of history that I am inclined to question. Was the bay called Frenchman Bay, as everyone has assumed, after Champlain and the French explorers from 1604, or was it named by the English after the French man-o-war battleships, aka Frenchmen, which used the bay from 1613 to 1760 as France and England battled for North America. I choose the later, and this bit of totally irrelevant information is further complicated by the fact that local Mainers add and “s” to many geographic placenames, including Frenchmans Bay.

On Dec 3rd U-1230 sank the Canadian freighter Cornwallis almost in view of the U.S. Coastguard station at Southwest Harbor. Question: why did U-1230 take this unusual risk for a small insignificant target?

According to radioman Horst Haslau, the sub was still in the area four days after landing the agents, in order to repair a ruptured pressure seal.

EDITOR NOTE – HORST HASLAU was Member #167-1986 before his death a few years ago.

Did U-1230 want a kill, any kill, or was it a diversion to cover their mission? A typical counterintelligence CI question would be, “Did they know we knew they were here?” Was ELSTER security that important, to sink a small cargo vessel bound for St. John, New Brunswick? If so, what about U-1230’s sister boats? Was Oskar Mantel the only agent aboard U-1229? Basic tradecraft and simple logistics generally demand at least two operatives on an infiltration-sabotage mission. The Navy treated Mantel as a POW, and refused to release him to the FBI. Unlike Gimpel and Colepaugh, he was not tried in military court and was not forced to testify about his mission. Until my research made the local press in 2001 (see also KTB#166, page 20) the U-1229 event was not connected to ELSTER by U.S. historians. Was Mantel a lone wolf on solo mission or was he, like Colepaugh, the U.S. access agent and communicator for another cell in the ELSTER operation? Was time of the essence? Did U-1229 run on the surface to make up for delayed departure, and if so, why? Did Mantel have a collateral mission? I will share more on this topic in Part V.

The notion of sending U-boats across the ocean to free German POWs in 1944-45 is as incredible as the idea of inserting agents by U-boat at that late date to hang out in bars to report troop deployments and political intentions. Historians may not like it, after six decades of telling us otherwise, but the ELSTER operation was more than about spying on the U.S. military and political situation. Did anyone not know where our troops were in Nov.1944? Carpet bombing of cities like Dresden, Germany’s strategic dishware center, left little doubt about Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s political intentions toward Germany. By the way, I am happy to report that German POWs in the rural Maine camps were not badly treated. In fact there are a number of blonde blue-eyed descendents in local family trees attesting to the location of German POW camps along the Maine-New Brunswick border.

Now let me back up to 1944 and address a couple minor historic details. Did Erich and Billy come ashore Nov.29 or Nov.30? Take your pick, both are correct. The coast of Maine was on U.S. Eastern standard time and U-1230 was on Greenwich or Berlin time. Hancock residents have become divided on “Who spotted the spooks!” There was no controversy in the extensive 1945 local and national press coverage, but as years pass in small towns, stories change like the seasons. Was it a) housewife, b) Boy Scout, or c) both? The answer is (c), they both spotted the agents. How can we be sure? I have a document marked SECRET, from the Feb.1945 military trial of Gimpel and Colepaugh.

Their testimony reads as follows: “About one-eight mile after we came off the path an automobile passed going south. It had been snowing slightly when we got off the submarine and it was snowing fairly heavy at this time. About a mile further another car passed us going in a southerly direction.”

Colepaugh was on the MIT track team and would know the exact length of an eighth-mile and a mile. Harvard Hodgkins was an assistant Boy Scout master, and a keen rabbit hunter. He showed the FBI where he first spotted the spies walking beside the road and where their tracks came out of the woods path leading to the shore. The distance? One-eight mile to the inch. Mary Forni, now 88, showed me the spot further up the road where she saw then. The distance from where Hodgkins saw them? One mile to the inch. Both Forni and Hodgkins said it was snowing very heavily when they spotted the agents. By the time Forni saw them the snow would have covered any tracks made earlier by Hodgkin’s car.

THE CONTEST – look again at the photo of DICK on the previous page. If you can tell “Where in the World” he was at the time, let us know immediately. There IS a prize.

There has been controversy about Hodgkins car, the dance he was coming from, and the time of night. Hodgkins was driving the family station wagon. He was a senior at Ellsworth high school 15 miles from Hancock Point, but the dance was not in Ellsworth as was reported by journalists in 1945, nor was it a school dance. It was a community dance held regularly at a place in Hancock called Townsend Hall. Because of the snowstorm Hodgkins left before the last dance, and after taking a girl home, was on his way home to Hancock Point when he saw Erich and Billy on a straight stretch of road below a junction known as Lounders Corner. It was about 11:15pm.

Who was the girl? That’s no one’s business but Harvard’s, and he died in 1984. Nov. 29th was a Wednesday, and a school-day. Harvard’s father, Dana Hodgkins, was the local Deputy Sheriff, and also a Maine Guide. He was with a group of hunters from Massachusetts at a remote hunting camp above Route 9, sixty miles away. He returned on Dec. 1st at which time the FBI office in Bangor was notified. By the way, Route 9, also known as the “Airline Road” cuts a line through the wilderness of eastern Maine from Bangor to Calais. WAAC pilots ferrying bombers to England used it as a bearing to set their lonely course over New Brunswick to Newfoundland, Iceland, and Scotland. It’s too late to volunteer as copilot, navigator, or any other category of airborne companion for those fair and brave lasses, but we can take off our hats and salute them!

After the FBI announced Gimpel and Colepaugh’s “capture” on 01 Jan.1945, Harvard Hodgkins was flown to New York and feted by the national media. This announced to Germany that their spies would be caught coming to America, and it focused their attention on a clever Boy Scout and away from anything else, especially Enigma machines! News headlines read: “Boy’s keen eyes, woman’s intuition led to capture of two German spies.”

The truth is, Forni and Hodgkins were not in any way responsible for the agents arrest. They were footloose and fancy-free in New York for a month, until Billy ratted out the operation. More important than who saw the spies, was the FBI’s wartime disinformation ploy that convinced everyone it was a sharp-eyed Boy Scout, and not U-Boat radio traffic, that alerted the U.S. Navy to their arrival. Harvard Hodgkins was given a full scholarship at the Maine Maritime Academy for his part in the wartime episode. He became a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Marine, and later a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.

THE CLUES – here are clues to help you solve the “Where in the World” is DICK GAY riddle, open only to SHARKHUNTERS Members. Place: Under cover Date: March 1983 Temp: +/- 30ºC or 85ºF Drink: Perrier Waiter: French Blond: German

It was known from Enigma decrypts that U-1230 was on a “special task” mission like that of her sister-sub U-1229. According to the radioman of U-1230, Horst Haslau, when they arrived off the Gulf of Maine his sub was warned by Control that communications were “penetrated” and the U.S. Navy was expecting them. Paradoxically, the Enigma intel source was tightly controlled by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and local defenses could not be informed the reason they were on alert; yet the fact is that the Enigma decrypts were no more responsible for Gimpel and Colepaugh’s roll-up than was the Boy Scout.

Espionage is a tricky business, and nowhere is this more manifest than in counterintelligence – spying on them trying to catch us spying on them, indeed! The commander of the Winter Harbor Navy Base was told to be on alert for “suspicious activities,” but was not told the source or any details why. After the U-1230 landing it was rumored in the village that “three spies” had been seen on the road, and three is what he reported to Washington. There was no “third man” on board U-1230 -- but what about on board U-1229?

More Questions

Let's go back to the Nov 29th snowstorm in Maine. Another question nagging people is, “How did Billy and Erich get a ride on a deserted road in the middle of the night to meet a train fifty miles away?” Answer: they took a cab! After Billy and Erich waved good-by to Fritz and Konrad, they hiked 4½ miles. It was around 12:30am EST on Nov 30th when they reached US Rt.1 at downtown metropolitan Hancock – watering trough, general store, two churches.

Cramped for weeks in a submarine followed by a forced 4½ mile hike in the snow, sausage links hanging from their pocket, two Colt .32s tucked into an overnight bag with $60,000 U.S. cash and 99 diamonds, Erich and Billy are resting by the old village watering trough. Don’t laugh. I’ve done worse, and didn’t get caught. Real world espionage and covert ops does not always follow a James Bond movie script.

The plan was to pass as stranded motorists (and it worked). But they are in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. So what do they do? They flag down a taxi and jump in. It’s true. Again paradoxically, the only taxi within 50 miles was coming from the Navy station down the road on Schoodic Point where it had just taken a group of sailors back to base. U.S. military out, German agents in!

After a quick stop in Ellsworth for a phone call, the taxi driver got the ok to take the stranded pair to Bangor for a $6.00 fare. Waiting in Bangor for a ride to the U.S. Coast Guard Station at Southwest Harbor were more sailors. Spies out, sailors in! Remember, the local bases were on alert, and being wartime all military personnel were in uniform, some armed with 45s. As we all know, when the alert whistle blows all personnel have to report back to base ASAP. Why were they on alert? Ask Billy and Erich. Ironically, the only taxi in miles was busy ferrying military personnel back to base, and enemy agents to catch a train! Billy and Erich caught the 2AM Portland train with 20 minutes to spare.

It was well known that Adm. Dönitz repeatedly warned the Abwehr that he suspected attacks on his U-boats were coming from penetrated cipher communications. High frequency direction-finding (HF-DF) and airborne radar were usually blamed, but could not explain all attacks, especially mid-ocean. The Abwehr’s communications intelligence COMINT service B-Dienst repeatedly assured Dönitz that the Enigma machine, even if one fell into enemy hands, was still secure if used properly. And secure it was, albeit for an ingenious contraption that I call “the Polish computer.”

As I have said before, Bletchley Park came to prominence after receiving from Polish intelligence not only a complete replication of the Enigma machine, but also the extraordinary Polish invention to recover rotor and key changes, called the bombe. The attached photo shows a bombe, one of many built in the U.S. This one was used to exploit the 4-rotor Enigma machine. The Polish bombe was mass-produced in England and the U.S., and expanded with new technology to keep pace with more complex Enigma machines, double-keys, more rotors, and two machines wired together.

To counter the double-machine my guess is we simply bonded two bombes. By the way, the word bombe (English bomb) comes from the Polish word bomba, referring to an ice cream cone, which the two Polish inventors were eating when the idea struck them! The invention was exfiltrated from Poland by way of France, hence the French spelling bombe. (photo below)

Technically, the term ULTRA is misused as a codename for the Enigma decrypts. I am not old enough to be an expert, but my source is a distinguished Naval officer who served at the Navy’s cryptanalytic center OP-20-G from 1942 to 1948. As we know, the British equivalent of our Top Secret was Most Secret, and the common US-UK codeword to identify special compartmented COMINT sources was “Ultra.” The codeword Ultra did not identify Enigma decrypts only, but any crypto-systems and any COMINT source, be it German, Japanese, Italian, etc. Obviously there was all-out effort on the high priority and voluminous Enigma traffic, and my guess is the Enigma classification “Most Secret Ultra” was shortened in the Brits jargon over time to “Ultra.” Perhaps Churchill started it when he began sharing Bletchley Park’s Enigma secrets with Roosevelt.

WC: “We learned today from Ultra that Hitler wears pink knickers.” FDR: “What the heck is Ultra?” WC: “Our Enigma decrypts!” FDR: “What the heck are knickers?”

The métier of a spy is espionage, collecting and reporting foreign intelligence, but spies are often assigned covert operations such as industrial sabotage. What was the most strategic U.S. industrial target in 1944? Anyone who thinks it was not the atom bomb please raise your hand.

It was no secret to intelligence services both sides of the Atlantic, that the side with atomic weapons wins the war. Endless news articles, books, even a prize-winning play, have been written about Germany’s atomic bomb program. Some would have us believe that Germany’s leading atomic physicist, Werner Heisenberg, sabotaged his own project. Dating from 1938 Germany had an atomic fission lab, and in 1939 pioneering atomic physicists, both Niels Bohr of Denmark and Heisenberg of Germany, visited the U.S. Immediately following Heisenberg’s visit, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Pres. Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility of a German A-bomb. That same year the German army weapons bureau took over the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Physics (KWP) in Berlin, and Heisenberg’s nuclear fission lab became an atomic bomb project.

In 1940 Germany seized the world’s only heavy-water production plant in Norway, and by 1942 Heisenberg had constructed an atomic reactor with uranium plates in a bath of heavy-water. I believe that the ELSTER mission was conceived by the Abwehr at a top secret meeting at the KWP institute in June 1944. The British raids on Germany’s heavy water supply in Norway had demonstrated that heavy-water was the weak link. No heavy-water, no bomb. In addition to the Oak Ridge complex, and other Manhattan Project facilities, I believe a first ELSTER target may have been a radiation lab in Massachusetts refining heavy-water for the uranium bomb developed at Oak Ridge, the “Fat-Boy” which was dropped over Hiroshima.

A “radiation lab” at MIT that developed U.S. radar technology, became public knowledge after the war, but data on the radiation lab that refined the heavy-water spectrum at Cambridge or Waltham may be so calcified under decades of secrecy, it’ll require a team of archeologists to identify.

Let’s assume for now that ELSTER operatives were primarily saboteurs. A collateral function may have been spying, but there is a technical difference. A spy collects info and reports it, and a saboteur makes things go boom. There is also a crime-and-punishment difference between spy and saboteur. Spies are sentenced to death, but saboteurs may be considered combatants, and held as POWs. Roosevelt, however, eliminated this possibility for the German agents with a personal letter, of which I have a photocopy. Ironically his death saved Gimpel and Colepaugh’s neck. Once in custody an illegal agent’s options are few. The choices are disinformation, defection, or death. Would Gimpel have revealed his true mission to his “interviewers” in Jan.1945? I doubt it, but if he did, it would not have been reported. Why?

The Manhattan Project was a compartmented top secret in 1945. Gimpel’s interrogators may not have been briefed on the U.S. atom bomb project. After the crime-and-punishment oriented FBI questioned him, Gimpel was visited on death row by kinder-gentler OSS officers. He refused their offers. The intelligence business is universally based not on politics but on facts. Like his two bosses, Adm. Canaris and Gen. Schellenberg, Gimpel viewed Adolph Hitler as a dangerous madman.

Yet like most of us in wartime, Gimpel followed orders from his commanders, and was loyal to his country. Note: did a secondary mission of Operation ELSTER somehow involve Adm. Dönitz’s proposal to use his big snorkel submarines as platforms to launch missiles against U.S. East Coast cities? Technically, the V1 was a cruise missile, and Germany was pursuing atomic warheads. Underwater launched V2 type missiles were on the planning table, and as we learned after the war, these were within German scientists’ capabilities.

Billy Colepaugh was obviously not briefed on the ELSTER operations main objectives, and under interrogation by the FBI, Gimpel hinted at the U-boat missile scheme as a diversion away from ELSTER. Was Gimpel the primary agent and designated coordinator for a larger ELSTER operation?

Anyone who seriously believes that Gimpel was sent to the U.S. as a spy to collect intelligence and report it to Berlin, please raise your hand. Gimpel was not 35 as reported in the press, he was about to turn 40. His Abwehr agent ID number was a low 146, suggesting he was very senior in the organization. He spoke several languages, including English, and had been selected for key covert assignments throughout Europe and South America, including a successful side trip into the U.S. If a spy traveling on non-official cover (NOC) is not imprisoned in a hostile country, his trip was successful. He was on a CI mission in Norway during the British sabotage operations on German heavy-water production.

Was he perhaps with the Abwehr group during that top secret meeting held at the KWP Institute in June, 1944? Was heavy-water discussed? There can be little doubt that Gimpel was not only a seasoned professional in the Abwehr, but remained so after the Abwehr military intelligence was moved over to the SS under Gen. Walter Schellenberg, who by the way was only two months older than Gimpel. Rank has it privilege, and according to Colepaugh, Gimpel was treated with the respect of a high-ranking officer in the Abwehr under Gen. Schellenberg. That Gimpel was selected as the one most qualified to coordinate a last-ditch covert operation for Germany, I have little doubt. The operation would have involved Germany’s fifth column assets in the U.S. and Canada, as well as agents from South America.

Skipping ahead to 9/11 you may find many similarities. This Part IV, which I had planned for about 2,000 words, has already run into twice that length, so I will try to cut it short. We have been led to believe that Gimpel was the radio operator. He was not. He was an electronics engineer and could easily build a radio, but Colepaugh was the U.S. access agent and radio communicator for Gimpel. In 1944 Colepaugh was thoroughly trained as a radio operator. Colepaugh was a defector with a drinking problem, but he was not the mental incompetent we have been led to believe. I have photocopies of Colepaugh’s extensive communications operating documents, radio call signs and transmission schedules, with sophisticated encryption procedures for security, etc.

I believe that Oskar Mantel was the access agent and communicator for a second cell, which may have included at least one other agent from U-1229 and fifth column assets on shore. How many cells were there in the ELSTER operation? Was the ELSTER operation big enough to deploy three or four (maybe more) new IX-C/40 submarines to the U.S? Was sister-sub U-1231 also in on the extended ELSTER operation? Between the St. Lawrence and Passamaquoddy Bay, were any ELSTER agents successfully landed in Canada?

Careful planning, and good security cannot be over-emphasized, but in the end lady luck plays a big part in any major covert operation. The German High Command went to great lengths to obtain accurate weather in planning military operations. Their insistence on daily weather reports in spite of Allied direction-finding and airborne radar took a toll on Adm. Dönitz’s submarines.

THE PRIZE – the first Member to correctly guess “Where in the World” DICK was sitting when that photo was snapped will win a free night for two at his really beautiful B & B here in the US. Answer will be in KTB #171 with Part V of this story.

After its departure from the Gulf of Maine on Dec 4th, U-1230 successfully dodged the U.S. 10th fleet, and remarkably still managed to report the weather. Who cares? The Battle of the Bulge started on 16 Dec.1944 -- the worst American defeat of the War, with 75,000 casualties. Extended bad weather grounded all Allied planes and restricted observation, and the Germans achieved total surprise. Did U-1230’s reporting give first news of the approaching bad weather? I’m afraid so.

On Dec 20th Großadmiral Dönitz radioed credit to U-870, U-1053, and U-1232 for their part in weather reporting to the battlefield success. He didn’t mention U-1230. Would he have drawn attention to a sub on a high priority covert operation by thanking it for weather reports? What about sister subs U-1231 and 1233? And what about the IXC/40 snorkels U-853 and 869? Was the USS EAGLE sinking off Portland possibly another Cornwallis? Was U-869’s regular Enigma traffic a diversion from the high-speed burst Kurier traffic? More to come in Part V.

This is extremely fascinating information and only available through Sharkhunters. Many thanks to DICK for putting it on paper, and to the rest of you “Spooks”…..why not send us your own memories. The same goes for you veterans of the war. Tell us what you did, what you remember from the war years – photo would be great, too. We will scan the photos then return them to you unharmed. Part V will be (should be) in KTB #171. Don’t miss it!