Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  In a reminder of Churchill’s great fear of a quarter of a century before, on 14 October the German U-47 crept past nets, booms, blockships, lookouts and patrols right into Scapa Flow, the Orkney-enclosed anchorage of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet. The U-boat torpedoed the huge 1914 battleship HMS Royal Oak, which sank in thirteen minutes with the loss of 810 officers and men. While struggling survivors in the water sang Roll Out the Barrel to keep their spirits up, the U-boat escaped. Four days later, Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien and his submarine crew surfaced, grinning, at a Nazi press conference, before being paraded through cheering crowds in Berlin. Churchill told the House of Commons that the Royal Navy had sunk 13 German U-boats and damaged some others, which was a better strike rate than in WW1. This was stretching the truth considerably, but Churchill felt he had to cheer the public up.

  Prien had visited Scapa Flow before the war, posing as a tourist, and had also used aerial reconnaissance Aufklärung photos taken from directly above to find a narrow way in for his boat to sink the Royal Oak. Both high-flying Abwehr aircraft and some Lufthansa civilian flights had been secretly photographing tracts of Britain long before war broke out, and now Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe was filling in the gaps.

  As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill went up to Scapa Flow, wept over the wreckage of the Royal Oak, and ordered more submarine defences. The death of one of his Dreadnoughts was a blow, making the nation seem vulnerable. Once again, when force had failed, he turned to fraud for protection. Churchill ordered the construction of dummy ships whose camouflage was good enough to deceive spotters in aeroplanes. He came back later to inspect the results. Mock-up warships were dotted about the huge Orkney anchorage. When Churchill pointed to one and said the Germans would never drop a bomb on it, he was told that it had convinced our own aerial reconnaissance. ‘Then they need spectacles,’ snapped the First Lord,

  No gulls about her! You always find gulls above a living ship. But not around a dummy, unless you drop refuse from it too. Keep refuse in the water day and night, bow and stern of all these dummies! Feed the gulls and fool the Germans!

  The British did manage to trick the German navy during the Battle of the River Plate in Montevideo, Uruguay. The German pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee was a fast armoured cruiser that could make twenty-six knots and carried six 11-inch guns with a range of seventeen miles. Accompanied by the auxiliary and prison ship Altmark, the Graf Spee continued the raiding practice of WW1, camouflaging herself as an Allied ship and sending false radio messages while sinking merchantmen in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. On 13 December 1939, lightly damaged after an engagement with the British cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles, the marauder made for neutral Montevideo for repairs. British diplomats, naval attachés and secret agents worked together to delay the process; meanwhile they used the BBC news, diplomatic and dockside gossip and talk on telephone lines they knew were tapped to suggest that a large British fleet, including the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, was just over the horizon, when in fact it was five days away. The Graf Spee’s skipper, Captain Langsdorf, a decent man, was deceived into thinking he had no chance of escaping to the high seas. He released his crew, scuttled the Graf Spee, went ashore at Buenos Aires and, wrapped in his navy’s ensign, shot himself.

  ‘It’s necessary to understand what real intelligence work is,’ John le Carré once told George Plimpton in the Paris Review. ‘At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy government curiosity … It’s the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.’ The Naval Intelligence Division (NID) was not a secret service: it had no agents who did covert espionage. Though secrecy was its character, it was not its essence, for the organisation dealt in legitimate information from many sources. British Naval Intelligence started getting its act together again during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, when the German and Italian navies were actively assisting General Franco’s rebellion against the Spanish Republic, and they had to be watched in the interests of the Royal Navy’s blockade and rescue missions. Lessons had been learned from WW1: what was needed was an active, well-wired brain in an acute nervous system. The Admiralty was unlike the War Office or the Air Ministry in that its primary function was not administrative but operational: the Royal Navy’s traditions were action and attack. What had gone wrong with the Admiralty’s cryptographic centre, Room 40, in WW1 was that its operational effectiveness was crippled by secrecy. Rigid compartments meant the brain’s synapses did not always fire efficiently. Then, when cryptanalysts had information about the German fleet, there was no system to communicate that data swiftly to the British fleet. The brain could not connect with the hand. Hence the failure at the Battle of Jutland, when poor communication of knowledge meant the two fleets effectively missed each other.

  When Rear Admiral John Godfrey became director of Naval Intelligence on 3 February 1939, he inherited the basis of an Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) and was able to consult the most celebrated of his predecessors, Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, and to follow his advice in setting up systems to feed that centre. Everything was of potential interest to the director of Naval Intelligence. The net had to be spread wider than the technical world of signals and direction-finding, and the right staff found to process lots of information. Effective intelligence-gathering required curious, sceptical, energetic people. Accordingly, the NID (which expanded in WW2 from employing dozens to thousands) was leavened with civilian scholars, barristers, solicitors, writers and journalists, including the novelists Charles Morgan and William Plomer, Simon Nowell-Smith of the Times Literary Supplement and Hilary St George Saunders, the House of Commons librarian. Admiral Godfrey instituted a vitally important grading system for intelligence: the letter stood for the source, the number for the information, so A1 was first rate and D5 most dubious.

  Admiral Godfrey made strong links with government, allied diplomats, the armed services and the secret ones, MI6, MI5 and Special Branch. He met Sir Roderick Jones of Reuters, the great press barons and their newspaper editors. Admiral Hall said the director of Naval Intelligence was entitled to enlist the help of anyone in the country from the Archbishop of Canterbury down, and he introduced Godfrey to Sir Montague Norman, governor of the Bank of England, and to various other powerful figures in the City of London. Hall himself had employed a stockbroker called Claude Serocold as his personal assistant in WW1 and advised Godfrey to do the same. The governor of the Bank of England and the chairman of Barings, Sir Edward Peacock, found Godfrey his right-hand man in May 1939. It was the suave chap who had drunk vodka with Sefton Delmer in the hotel opposite the Kremlin, the stockbroker Ian Lancaster Fleming.

  Ian Fleming was an inspired choice to lead the coordinating section of Naval Intelligence, NID 17, where he had to supply ingenious ideas, create structural order, and liaise externally with the wider world. After Eton and Sandhurst, Ian Fleming had learned German and French, and worked for Reuters as a reporter before he became a stockbroker in the City. In Moscow in March 1939 he had told Delmer he was there as a favour to the editor of The Times. Years later, with the benefit of hindsight, Delmer claimed that

  As soon as I saw [Ian Fleming], I knew he was on some intelligence job or other … he made such a determined show of typing away whenever the Russians were looking that it was clear he was no ordinary journalist.

  On the train back to Warsaw, heading for the border of Stalinist Russia, Delmer had memorised his notes, torn them up and thrown them away. ‘Why don’t you swallow them?’ mocked Ian Fleming, ‘That’s what all the best spies do.’ But at Negeloroje, the customs officials went through Fleming’s luggage with a toothcomb, stripped him and searched him. A carton of Russian contraceptives made of artificial latex which he was taking back to London to have the formula analysed was opened and each condom held up to the light. Fleming was already blushing scarlet when Delmer whispered, ‘You should have swallowed them.’

  Five months after this train journey, in the autum
n of 1939, Delmer invited Fleming to lunch at his flat in Lincoln’s Inn. Fleming turned up looking elegant in the dark blue uniform of the Royal Navy with the waved stripe-and-curl insignia of a lieutenant in the Volunteer Reserve.

  ‘I thought you’d been to Sandhurst. What are you doing in the navy?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been given a special desk job at the Admiralty.’

  Over coffee and brandy, Fleming announced that his boss would like to hear what Delmer had observed of the war in Poland. The reporter said he had seen no ships, only some bombing and air fighting, a lot of retreating and some excited people shooting fifth columnists. Nothing to interest the navy.

  ‘Never you worry your head about that. Just do as I tell you.’

  The next day, Delmer turned up at a door in the Mall behind the statue of Captain Cook and was escorted along sixty yards of bleak corridor to a transept in front of room 39. When the door opened he saw a crowded office with three tall windows looking out across the parade ground used for Trooping the Colour. A dozen men were working at desks and talking on the telephone, reminding Delmer of the back room of a Beirut bank, except the men were not clerks but section chiefs of British Naval Intelligence. Ian Fleming opened the door to room 38 and ushered Delmer in to meet Admiral Godfrey. There were other naval captains and commanders in the room as well as army and air force officers. They asked him a lot of questions and he told them, as he thought, ‘little of interest’. But to the Express man the meeting was supremely interesting. He had discovered how important his friend Ian Fleming had become, ‘nothing less than “17F”, the personal assistant to the intelligence chief of the Senior Service.’ Delmer also found himself curiously at home in a place where he would later do some of his greatest work.

  Ian Fleming had the social confidence and forcefulness of character required to be an effective factotum to his energetic and horribly hard-driving boss. Fleming was not the wisest, but certainly the most vivid personality in NID 17: ‘a skilled fixer and a vigorous showman’, said Donald McLachlan, the historian of room 39. Fleming’s Reuters training in good clear English made him first choice to draft his boss’s replies to Churchill’s imperious requests. Winston was back, and as demanding as ever.

  The outbreak of war brought a frenzy of reorganising. The Ministry of Information (MoI) was one of two new British ministries that came into being. The other was the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), tasked with disorganising the enemy’s economic life so that Germany could not fight. Some thought the Ministry of Information was doing the same job on the communications of the Home Front. The Senate House of London University was taken over by 999 civil servants and new appointees. An officious law lord, Baron Macmillan, now had a brief spell as the first Minister of Information. As Hugh Macmillan, he had been John Buchan’s assistant director of Intelligence in the old WW1 Ministry of Information.

  Sixty-four-year-old Buchan now bore the title Lord Tweedsmuir and was living in Ottawa. In his role as governor general, it had been his melancholy duty to sign Canada’s declaration of war against Germany. ‘This is the third war I have been in,’ he wrote to an old friend, ‘and no-one could hate the horrible thing more than I do.’ He gave Macmillan advice from far away: no direct propaganda to America, no jibes at isolationism, ‘no attempt to varnish’, ‘never deny a disaster’. He also suggested, ‘Our news should follow the Reuter plan and be as objective as possible,’ although this would mean battling the War Office and the Admiralty’s ‘passion for babyish secrecy’.

  The MoI was meant to distribute news on behalf of all Government departments and the three fighting services, but this information policy (open doors and windows) conflicted with its second responsibility, which was censorship (close all doors and windows). It was possibly deformed by the secrecy of its gestation for future wartime needs, in late 1935, under the auspices of a standing subcommittee of the Committee for Imperial Defence. The MoI was meant to be in the public relations business, and its first director was intended to be Sir Stephen Tallents, the imaginative civil servant who wrote The Projection of England, a pamphlet that led to the founding of the British Council. But the appointment did not happen, as Tallents was replaced by Macmillan, and the ill-favoured MoI that shambled into the light looked askance at news or publicity. Fierce ‘D’ Notices were slapped on newspapers; the BBC was restricted. After four months, Macmillan was replaced by Sir John Reith, formerly of the BBC and Imperial Airways. In the MoI he found a lawyer running censorship, a man who saw his job as interpreting the regulations rabbinically rather than trying to woo a little more news from the Armed Services than they wanted to give. ‘Also he thought an event wasn’t news till the press got it!’ John Reith wrote in his diary. ‘Weird and infuriating. Save us from lawyers.’ The Home Publicity Division of the Ministry attempted to boost morale, but failed. Its first poster, reading ‘Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us Victory’ soon had cynical and disaffected members of the public asking who exactly ‘you’ and ‘we’ were in this equation.

  The MoI was not responsible for the propaganda leaflets or ‘bomphs’ that showered over Germany at the start of the war. These were produced by a shadowy organisation in London called Department EH, whose letters stood for Electra House, a large building on Victoria Embankment where the chairman of the Imperial Communications Advisory Board had his office. He was the very same Sir Campbell Stuart who had run Crewe House in WW1 and who had been invited to do the same job of Propaganda to Enemy Countries during 1938. Department EH’s first job, at the height of the Munich crisis, was to help get German translations of speeches by Chamberlain, Daladier and Roosevelt rapidly broadcast on the powerful commercial station, Radio Luxembourg, which was close to Germany and audible by many there. This was a delicate matter. The BBC itself was actually trying to get Luxembourg closed down as a ‘pirate’ station because so many British listeners preferred its light music to BBC fare, so the corporation was not best pleased when its staff and facilities at Broadcasting House were hurriedly used by the British government to assist a rival broadcaster.

  The head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, is traditionally referred to as ‘C’ after the initial letter of the surname of its first head in 1911, Mansfield Cumming. Before the war, SIS’s reputation was probably a lot higher in spy fiction than it was in reality. Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair liked secrecy, and being the only one ‘in the know’, for security reasons. Most SIS officers then operated abroad as Passport Control Officers in British embassies and consulates, but in late 1936, aware that this was well known to UK’s enemies, Sinclair had secretly established an alternative organisation, the ‘Z’ network, to gather intelligence from Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent from Fascist Italy. ‘Z’ was run by Claude Dansey, and the cover story for the end of his career in the Secret Service was the plausible rumour that he had been sacked for dipping his hand in the till in Rome. Nobody else in SIS apart from Admiral Sinclair knew about ‘Z’, which operated from a suite on the eighth floor of the north-west wing of Bush House and used adjoining companies – Geoffrey Duveen & Co, Joel Brothers Diamond Company – as a front.

  In March 1938 Sinclair had also asked Major Lawrence Grand, RE to look at the possibilities of creating a British organisation for covert offensive activities, looking at ‘every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military forces’. Grand was promoted to colonel and set up the Devices or Destruction Section of MI6 – Section D – with the innocuous camouflage name of the Statistical Research Department of the War Office, and he began establishing a network of agents in cities abroad, especially in the Balkans. He started studying undercover sabotage, the training of saboteurs and methods of countering sabotage, as well as producing and experimenting with ammunition and explosives. Secret services are supposed to keep quiet about what they do, but Section D was bound to produce a lot of noise, which conflicted with that. Section D, moreover, saw destructive sabotage
against potential enemies as not just physical, but also moral, mental, and verbal. But these were also in the spheres of propaganda and radio, which brought in EH, the Overseas Department of the Ministry of Information, and MI7 in the War Office, leaving plenty of room for confusion and muddle.

  From March 1939, Sinclair’s Secret Service money was also paying for a small War Office Military Intelligence Research unit called MI (R), headed by a fiery, chain-smoking Royal Engineer called Colonel J. C. F. Holland. Jo Holland was already immersed in the study of guerrilla warfare, and wrote a joint paper with Grand in March 1939 on possible guerrilla operations against Germany. MI (R)’s brief was to keep studying unconventional warfare for the uniformed services, to draw up a Field Service Regulations Handbook for guerrillas and organised irregular bands, and to investigate any destructive devices that could be produced to help them. Holland appointed two grade II staff officers to assist him. Major Colin Gubbins of the Royal Artillery researched and wrote two pamphlets, The Partisan Leader’s Handbook (‘Surprise is the most important thing in everything you undertake’) and, with Holland, The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, which looked particularly at T. E. Lawrence in WW1, the IRA, the Arab rebellion in Palestine and the North-West Frontier of India. The other grade II officer Colonel Holland appointed, a bang-happy sapper called Major Millis Jefferis, who later invented the ‘sticky bomb’, wrote How To Use High Explosives. (‘If distributed today,’ Patrick Howarth remarked in his book, Undercover, in 1980, ‘they would probably be described as terrorists’ handbooks.’). MI (R) also headhunted especially adventurous types from among the linguists, explorers, writers and executives already earmarked by the director of military intelligence. After being interviewed by Major Gerald Templer of military intelligence in War Office room 365, they would be sent in plain clothes to Cambridge for a course (later informally known as ‘The Gauleiters’) whose lectures covered guerrilla warfare, resistance, sabotage, subversion and clandestine wireless communication.