British spy files shed light on Nazi saboteurs
Today, the British National Archives released 180 previously classified MI5 files on a variety of topics: World War II, the spread of Communism, etc. Professor Christopher Andrew of the University of Cambridge recorded a podcast about the files published in this current release.
One of the files, catalog number KV3/413, is a report on a failed German mission of sabotage in the United States during World War II. The story of the “Franz Daniel Pastorious Undertaking,” summarized by Jill Lawless of the Associated Press, is an amazing tale of incompetence:
They went to Paris, where one of the team got drunk at the hotel bar and “told everyone that he was a secret agent” — something, the MI5 report notes, that may “have contributed to the failure of the undertaking.”
The submarine dropping half the group on Long Island ran aground, and MI5 noted that “it was only owing to the laziness or stupidity of the American coast guards that this submarine was not attacked by U.S. forces.”
The Germans were stopped by a coast guard, who — to the evident astonishment of the British — did not detain them. He told his superiors, who were slow to contact the FBI.
The others in Florida also made it ashore, despite their attention-grabbing attire of “bathing trunks and army forage caps.”
The full 93-page report will be available for free through the Archives’ DocumentsOnline service for one month, if you have a hankering to dive into historical material. Here’s one of my favorite tidbits:
… he was taken first to see Captain Spies, who was believed to be responsible for [Abwehr] II work in Central America.
Captain Spies is the greatest military intelligence name ever.