Books: Operation North Pole

LONDON CALLING NORTH POLE (208 pp.)—H. J. Giskes—British Book Centre ($3.50).

The decisive moment for Operation North Pole came at 2 p.m. on March 15, 1942. At that moment H. M. G. Lauwers, a Dutch agent of British Intelligence, sat in a German police headquarters near The Hague with his hand on the radio key that was his link with London. The Germans wanted to make the link theirs; Lauwers, recently arrested, had agreed to cooperate. Suspecting that Lauwers might doublecross them, the Germans were ready to jam the signal at the first misplaced dot or dash. But Lauwers had no intention of straying from his captors’ text; his British instructions, he says, called for him to garble every 16th letter. By omitting the prearranged errors, he would be informing London that he had been caught.

Lauwers sent, and London replied. German Intelligence had established direct contact with the British Secret Service.

A question remained: Who was fooling whom? Three days later, London ordered that a zone be prepared for an “important drop.” In the early hours of March 28, at an isolated spot near Steenwijk, the Germans signaled in a twin-engine bomber on a triangle of lights. Silhouetted against the moonlight, the bomber swept down to 600 feet, as the Germans wondered if the important drop would turn out to be bombs. An instant later, five “gigantic black shadows” parachuted down—four containers of material, and an agent. The British had seemingly forgotten their own verification checks, and handed over the key to their Dutch communications.

A Deadly Hoax. In London Calling North Pole, Lieut. Colonel H. J. Giskes, onetime chief of German military counterespionage in The Netherlands, tells how he masterminded Operation North Pole and supplied the British Secret Service with the kind of secret service it is unaccustomed to getting. For 20 tragic months the deadly hoax continued, as German Intelligence handled the Dutch operations of British Intelligence and received almost 200 drops of men and material. “Tons of the most modern explosives . . . thousands of automatic firearms with enormous quantities of ammunition, and mountains of machine pistols and machine guns” were dropped into waiting German hands. Posing as resistance men, German reception committees greeted 54 British agents, pumped them of the secrets they knew, then threw them into jail. The Nazis executed 47, despite Giskes’ promise that their lives would be spared.

To buttress London’s confidence, Giskes produced “results” which the British would learn about from other sources. He planted in the Dutch press articles about spurious exploits, staged a spectacular explosion of a junk-laden barge in the Maas River at Rotterdam, and even returned some downed British flyers through Spain, secretly chaperoned by German agents.

The Bad News. The Secret Service compounded its original error, says Giskes, by making drops “rigidly and without variation for over a year.” There is no telling how long the Secret Service would have kept it up if two agents had not escaped and told London the bad news. After that, London’s messages over the ten lines then leading to Giskes’ office were uniformly dull. Giskes ended the tragic farce with a final message for the section chiefs he had fooled: “We understand that you have been endeavoring for some time to do business in Holland without our assistance. We regret this the more since we have acted for so long as your sole representatives in this country, to our mutual satisfaction . . . Should you be thinking of paying us a visit on the Continent … we shall give your emissaries the same attention as we have hitherto.”

On D-day and after, a successful visit was paid, but the British Secret Service has still never sent Giskes an answer to his last message. When the book appeared in Britain early this year, it raised a small storm and a parliamentary demand for a full investigation. “It is contrary to the public interest.” the government replied, “to publish details of the affairs of secret organizations.”