The Abwehr and his agents have always been among the priority targets of the decryptors in Britain, and on December 8, 1941, another episode occurred with the disclosure of German spies. On this day, in Bletchley Park, a cryptogram was deciphered from a special "reconnaissance" version of the Enigma. A group of agents was taken, some of them were recruited and started a radio game in the interests of British intelligence.
Also, the interceptions of the Enigma later made it possible to track down the spy Simoes, a Portuguese by nationality, who was doing his dirty deed in Britain. He turned out to be not the best spy - during interrogation he gave out everything he knew, and he motivated his work for the Germans with the opportunity to simply get to England and earn money. The punishment for the loser spy was relatively mild by wartime standards. For all its effectiveness, catching Portuguese agents was too frivolous for such a gigantic project as Ultra.
But the story with two saboteurs (Erich Gimpel and William Kolpag), who landed on the US coast from the German submarine U-1230 on November 29, 1944, could have ended tragically without information from Bletchley Park. The purpose of the saboteurs was radio command guidance to New York of an experimental intercontinental ballistic missile, which was built in Germany by Wernher von Braun.
Erich Gimpel
The first signals about suspicious individuals came to the FBI from local residents, but in a war they could become one of thousands of such signals and go unnoticed. But earlier, US counterintelligence received information from overseas colleagues that the U-1230 submarine was carrying out some special mission off the coast. As a result, the area of the alleged landing was combed, Gimpel and Kolpag were missed, but nevertheless, a few weeks later, they were detained in the New York area. The search for such important saboteurs became the largest US special operation during the war.
Contacts with the Soviet Union under the Ultra program were very limited, but had a significant impact on the course of hostilities on the eastern front. From the very beginning, the command of British intelligence was categorically opposed to providing data on the decryption of the "Enigma" to the leadership of the USSR, but, as always, Winston Churchill had the last word. Despite intelligence arguments indicating the weakness of Soviet ciphers and their potential to be intercepted, the Prime Minister ordered the transfer of information about the impending attack on the USSR to the country's leadership. In fairness, it should be noted that the British opinion about the weakness of domestic ciphers was completely unfounded, but this will be a different story. Another thing is that Stalin and his entourage could not adequately assess the information from Great Britain and did not do enough to repel the German attack.
There were warnings about the impending attack on the Soviet Union in Moscow, including from Bletchley Park. True, the British were hiding the true source of information.
Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky
On this score, there is a statement by Marshal A. Vasilevsky: “What is the reason for such a major miscalculation by the experienced and far-sighted statesman Joseph Stalin? First of all, our intelligence agencies, as G. K. Zhukov, could not fully objectively assess the information received about the military preparations of Nazi Germany and honestly, in a party-like manner, report it to Stalin. I will not touch upon all aspects of this situation, they are mostly known. I will dwell only on the fact that some isolation of the intelligence department from the General Staff apparatus apparently played a role in this. The intelligence chief, being at the same time the deputy people's commissar of defense, preferred to report on intelligence directly to Stalin, bypassing the chief of the General Staff. If G. K. Zhukov had been aware of all the most important intelligence information … he would probably have been able to draw more accurate conclusions from it and more authoritatively provide these conclusions to Stalin and thereby somehow influence the beliefs of the country's leader that we are able to delay the start of the war, so that Germany will not dare to fight on two fronts - in the West and in the East”. It should be noted separately that in the information messages from Great Britain for Stalin there was not a word about the interception of the Enigma - Churchill always referred to sources in neutral countries, testimonies of prisoners, etc. Any details that could reveal information that the data was obtained from decryptions were excluded. Thus, on September 30, 1942, Churchill wrote to Stalin: “From the very source that I used to warn you about the impending attack on Russia a year and a half ago, I received the following information. I believe this source is absolutely trustworthy. Please let this be for your information only. In this message, Britain warned the USSR about the plans of the Germans in the North Caucasus direction. The British leadership was very worried about the possibility of Hitler's breakthrough to the oil fields of Baku. Perhaps, if Churchill from the very beginning informed the Soviet Union about the seriousness of the Ultra program and the possibilities of decrypting the Enigma, they were more attentive to his messages?
The British shared information with Russia with the results of Ultra until the end of 1942, after which the trickle of information dried up. The next big "leak" of data was information about the Stalingrad and Kursk battles, but since 1944, materials from "Ultra" have officially ceased to come to the Soviet Union. And in 1941 there was still a fairly active exchange of intelligence data between the two allies - Britain and the USSR. Then our "brothers in arms" handed over the codes to the Luftwaffe and instructions for opening hand ciphers to the German police, and in return received cipher documents seized by Soviet troops. Later, Stalin outwitted himself to the detriment of the British, when he received from them materials on opening the hand codes of the Abwehr, but did not provide anything in response. Naturally, the British leadership did not like this, and there were no more such gifts.
But even the meager flow of information based on the decrypted Enigma messages, unfortunately, was not always properly perceived in Russia. In the spring - summer of 1942, England informed about the impending German offensive near Kharkov, but no one responded adequately, and the Red Army suffered heavy losses. For all the ambiguity of the situation, one should not perceive the Russian leadership as too self-confident and distrustful of the British - the French did the same, and even the British themselves. And they were aware of the true source of the information. For example, in the summer of 1940, a Polish decryption team established that the Luftwaffe was preparing a major raid on Paris. The French were notified of the number of aircraft, their route, flight altitudes and even the exact date and time of the attack. But no one did anything, and on June 3, 1940, the Germans carried out the first bombing of the French capital with the complete inaction of the country's air defense and air force. Much later, in 1944, the British Field Marshal Montgomery, knowing about the presence of two tank units in the landing area near the city of Arnhem (Holland), ordered to throw out the regiments of the 1st Airborne Division, where they died. The information naturally came from Bletchley Park.
7, 5 cm Pak 41 shells cutaway. One of the samples "loaded" with tungsten
But the history of WWII knows examples of extremely useful use of the results of deciphering the "Enigma". At the beginning of 1942, the British leadership received information from Bletchley Park that the German high command was ordering the retreating units to prevent the latest anti-tank shells from falling into the hands of the enemy. This information was shared with the Soviet Union, and it turned out that after the battle for Moscow the very same miracle shells were in our hands. The analysis showed that the German industry uses an alloy for the core - tungsten carbide, and then the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition began to spin. It turned out that there are no tungsten deposits in Germany itself, and supplies of such strategic raw materials were carried out from a number of neutral countries. The British and American intelligence services worked quite effectively, and the Nazis lost such a valuable resource.
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