118 • COVENTRY RAID
mised that it was said a group ofAbwehrofficers in Lisbon had been
heard singing ‘‘Zwefland, Zwelfland uber Alles’’ in a public ac-
knowledgment that the number 12 had been assigned to Germany.
The other numbers were: 11, Bulgaria; 13, Belgium; 14, Romania;
15, Hungary; 16, Iceland; 18, Turkey; 19, Denmark; 21, Finland; 22,
Great Britain; 23, Spain; 24, Portugal; 27, France; 29, Czechoslova-
kia; 32, Italy; 33, Holland; 34, Siberia; 35, Yugoslavia; 36, Sweden;
37, Japan; 38, Poland; 44, Austria; 45, United States; 47 Ukraine; 75,
South America; and 96, Soviet Union.
In addition, SIS designated numbers to personnel posted overseas,
based on the same system, so 14000 would be the station commander
in Bucharest, and the deputy commander in Rome was 32100. Thus
an agent recruited by theSection Vofficer in Madrid would be likely
to have a number like 235001.COVENTRY RAID.The Luftwaffe launched a devastating attack on
Coventry in November 1940 despite British knowledge of the navi-
gation system used by the enemy to guide their bombers to their tar-
gets and the ability to ‘‘bend the beams’’ along which the aircraft
flew. The messages indicating the VHF frequencies on which the
beams were to be transmitted were encrypted on anEnigmacipher
regularly read atBletchley Park, but on this occasion the wrong fre-
quency was passed to 80 Wing, theRoyal Air Force(RAF) unit re-
sponsible for aspirin, the countermeasure used to distort the
enemy’s signal and divert the raiders away from their targets. Infor-
mation gathered byAir Intelligenceat the PoW interrogation center
at Trent Park, Cockfosters, suggested an imminent massed attack
codenamedmoonlight sonatawould be directed against a city in
the Midlands, and the RAF was confident that the date and precise
target would be revealed byultrain good time for the countermea-
sures to be deployed. However, in the event,aspirinfailed, and the
mistaken belief grew that British Intelligence had allowed the raid to
proceed in order to protect theultrasource. This myth was given
wide circulation byFred Winterbothamand Anthony Cave Brown,
but was disproved bySir Harry Hinsley’s official history.
COVERT HUMAN INTELLIGENCE SOURCE (CHIS).The po-
lice prefer not to use the term ‘‘agent,’’ so the managerial term for a
human source is referred to by the acronym CHIS.