The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  The wireless set in the Embassy was fairly large, a non-portable set, for operating the main traffic. But after about a couple of months on the main traffic work from the Embassy I was kind of allocated the job of organising the [installation] of small suitcase radio sets in all the Consulates and a few private houses in the ports of Spain so that we could set up a network which would pass information on German or Italian shipping using Spanish ports.

  ‘For about . . . seven or eight months I was engaged on that work. Putting sets in, doing tests and occasionally passing some information . . . Although one had a feeling that one was doing useful work.

  Useful but uncomfortable: the Spanish authorities, noticeably less friendly to the British than to the Germans, were now enforcing increasingly strict rules about clandestine radio communications. The British, explained Mr Williams, could not afford to be caught out or make any false moves.

  The radio sets were sent out from London in the ‘Diplomatic Bag’. The method we used to operate was that occasionally I would go under non Diplomatic cover, but on the whole one used to go under full Diplomatic cover with someone driving a Diplomatic car, so that it wouldn’t be stopped carrying somewhat incriminating equipment.

  I left the equipment in different ports. In places the equipment was just left there so that it was available if something came up which required its use.

  Later on, though, Mr Williams’ war was to hot up considerably, as the wireless work became direct and aggressive:

  On the German iron ore trade (out of Bilbao) there were three ships – the Hocheimer, the Rastenburg and Barfels. They were the names I was using in the telegrams. The idea was in fact to sink the ships or to destroy them using submarines based just outside the various harbours. And the first ship was the Hocheimer that was . . . sunk by the submarine HMS Sceptre just outside Bilbao harbour after I’d passed the information. Well, we’d been telling them: it’s getting ready, getting steam up, it’s actually going out of the harbour.

  Mr Williams and his colleagues were of course placing themselves at serious risk by making such transmissions. And as a further indication of where the Spanish authorities stood on the matter of Germany, reports of the sinking of the Hocheimer were firmly kept out of the local newspapers. About six weeks later, though, the Y Service once more began transmitting to the nearby offshore submarine. The target ship this time was the Rastenburg. Mr Williams recalled lightly:

  The ship was tied up to be loaded when she was struck by torpedoes from HMS Sceptre which caused somewhat of an incident. As it was in neutral territory – and I believe a couple of Spanish policemen were killed at the time – so that [made it into] the press. Anyhow one was aware of what had happened.

  The third ship was the Barfels . . . I remember going in, in the evening to start sending the messages and I was met and they said, “No, don’t come in. We mustn’t do anything tonight.”

  Mr Williams’s colleagues had received advance intelligence that their role in the sabotage had been noted, and might soon be brought to a swift, brutal end. It was imperative that they avoid their transmission station that night. Instead, remembered Mr Williams, ‘we went round all the bars and pubs in Bilbao in the most populated places eventually getting to bed very early in the morning.’

  It wasn’t until forty years later that, through a pure coincidence, Mr Williams discovered quite how close to lethal danger he had been. For while abroad, engaged in telecommunications work, he had an extraordinary conversation one evening. ‘There was a German who was working for the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and we got talking, got friendly and he said that he been in the German Intercept Service during the war.’ The pair established that they had been in Spain, and at the same time too. ‘And from that I said, “Had you ever heard me?” And then he said, “Well, where were you on the night of July 14th?” And he said that he had been part of a German team sent to assassinate me!’4

  The use of embassies as cover for Y Service work spread to cities such as Istanbul. Illicit stations were particularly good at picking up short-range messages that might be missed at a greater distance. Moreover, as Bill Miller had found in Spain, those sending such messages might be so confident that no one was eavesdropping that they would not even bother to encode them. In 1943, in fact, Istanbul was considered such a prized hub that no fewer than thirty secret listeners – headed by a very senior intelligence officer, Captain Thomas Howat, who had been drafted from the station in Sarafand, Palestine – were operating out of the attic of the British consulate. Their presence was explained to the outside world as ‘shipping clerks’.

  In north Africa, the Italians and the Germans were being pushed back step by step – General Montgomery having declared his intention to ‘drive the enemy into the sea’ – and the work of the cryptographers played a crucial role in this ineluctable progress. Thanks to the decoding of one especially detailed Enigma message, the Navy hunted down and destroyed an Italian merchant ship that was sailing with vast amounts of fuel and military supplies as cargo. Elsewhere, the American air force tracked down another supply ship. Days later, the Allies took Tunisia, after determined and desperate fighting from the trapped and beleaguered Axis forces. As the German military in Tunisia surrendered unconditionally, the Luftwaffe made a hasty withdrawal to Sicily.

  Yet in Tangier, Morocco, the proxy intelligence wireless war continued. For Y Service operative Bill Miller, this was to be one of the most significant times of his life; a colourful blur of excitement and, indeed, love.

  One hot day, Miller and his colleague Roy ‘were walking down to the Old City and had to cross the “Socco Grande”,’ recalls Geoffrey Pidgeon. The Socco Grande was a ‘large open square where the market was held’. And it was very much the sort of market that would have attracted any English person; a cacophonous blend of local merchants, silks, spices and fruits, alongside diversions such as snake-charmers and storytellers. Also situated on the square was the German legation, with its swastika flag flying from the side of the building. As Pidgeon wrote:

  It was then that Bill glanced across to a cafe at the entrance to the market place, which had an adjoining tea room. Although [he and his colleague] knew most of the bars and cafes in Tangiers, they had never been in that one, one reason being that it was frequented with Germans from the legation opposite . . . It was at that moment that Bill was stopped in his tracks. He felt he had never seen such a beautiful girl as the one who was then glancing through the window . . .

  Whatever scruples he may previously have had about taking refreshment with Nazis at the next-door table, Miller apparently swiftly abandoned them in the face of this extraordinary woman. ‘[They] went into the tea-rooms,’ continued Pidgeon. ‘Sure enough, there were a couple of Germans having coffee and cake. They looked at one another, each knowing who the other was, but then ignored each other. Bill’s eyes and thoughts were on the girl. She was well-dressed and extremely beautiful . . .’5

  Whatever the yearnings of the heart, there were other immediate and serious considerations. Men in the Y Service were constantly warned about women, and particularly about talking to strange women. And extra care was advised to be taken about talking to strange women in the marketplace of Tangier. The town was milling with spies and agents. Pidgeon concluded the story:

  So [as] Bill and Roy sat in the tea-room they tried to make out her nationality. ‘Whatever their nationality, people in Tangiers were either strongly pro-Allies or pro-German . . . Bill began going to the tea-rooms regularly, often with friends from the office. At various times they heard her speaking French, Spanish and Italian . . . Eventually he asked a friend who she was and was told “Oh, that’s Ramona”. She was Spanish and a member of the pro-Allies Spanish community. Bill asked to be introduced and to cut a long story short, eventually they married.

  13 Not So Quiet on the Domestic Front

  The amateurs in Britain had been silenced, their aerials long since taken down. At the very start of the war, it
had been decreed that radio enthusiasts – no matter how patriotic and finely intentioned – would have to sacrifice their beloved hobby. The risk to national security was simply too great. If home-made aerials at the bottom of gardens were to remain commonplace, it would be a huge boost to enemy agents working on British soil; they would be able to make clandestine reports to their Nazi masters unnoticed by anyone in the neighbourhood.

  As we have seen, the passion of the amateurs was instead channelled brilliantly into the Voluntary Interceptors movement, and indeed, these volunteers performed invaluable service. But the agents of the Radio Security Service were constantly alert to the possibility that more sinister forces were at work.

  A few years ago, one former RSS agent, interviewed about his war years, told the BBC that when enemy messages from spies were transmitted and picked up by the RSS monitors, the agents would go out in cars with portable receivers in order to track down the exact source of these radio emissions. The image that comes to mind is that of an old TV detector van, the aerial on its roof. The truth was not so very different.

  Illicit transmissions were not always directed towards the Germans, though. There were other clandestine interests. And a case of this kind from 1943 involving the RSS has links to one of Britain’s longest-running spy controversies. It involved a woman spy called Ursula Beurton, resident in England throughout the war, whose remarkable career has long been a source of fascination to Chapman Pincher, the veteran hounder of Soviet moles. These days, Beurton is perhaps most notorious for having passed messages for Klaus Fuchs, the scientist who leaked to the Soviets the secrets of atomic weapons research. According to Pincher, though, her greatest coup was rather bigger: it directly involved the puzzling absence of the Radio Security Service.

  By 1943, married to Leonard Beurton, Ursula (or, as she was later to be labelled, ‘Red Sonya’) was settled in a cottage in Kidlington, just outside Oxford. One night, according to Pincher, she opened up a cavity in the wall of the back garden, removed a hidden miniature radio transmitter, took it into the kitchen, and started transmitting in Morse. The nature of her intelligence was far from routine; indeed, according to Pincher, it was nothing less than the outline of the top secret Quebec Agreement between Roosevelt and Churchill – a pact in which the two leaders vowed to form an atomic military alliance, and also, vitally, to hide any suggestion of this alliance or the associated research from the Soviets. The agreement had been signed only two weeks beforehand: Pincher’s theory is that Beurton could only have received this intelligence from someone in the highest ranks of MI5, a long-standing Soviet mole. And that she was used by this mole as the conduit to pass information back to Russia.

  But given the illegal nature of the transmission – plus the fact that Beurton had a forbidden radio transmission aerial in her back garden – how exactly did she escape the normally hyper-efficient attentions of the Radio Security Service? Again, according to Pincher, in one sense she didn’t: the fact that she was transmitting was noted and a Radio Security Service ‘detector van’ operating in Oxfordshire was sent to the Kidlington area. But a senior intelligence official supposedly advised the RSS not to pursue the case – Pincher’s theory is that it was Roger Hollis, former head of MI5, long suspected of himself being a Soviet spy. And so ‘Red Sonya’ could keep transmitting – until, just after the war, she fled Britain for the sanctuary of Communist East Germany. In 2000, Russian president Vladimir Putin awarded her the comically distinguished title of ‘Super Agent Of Military Intelligence’.

  This story aside, there seemed throughout the war to be a great deal less domestic espionage activity than anyone had anticipated. Furthermore, thanks to the Radio Security Service and its assiduous monitoring of the Abwehr codes, it was usually known some way in advance when such agents or double agents would be arriving in Britain. From this point, there was either the opportunity of ‘turning’ agents, or indeed of ensuring that double agents obtained a stream of misinformation which they could dutifully feed back to their masters. (The most famous example, ‘Agent Garbo’, sent a great many detailed radio messages that were invaluable in deflecting attention away from the planned Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France.)

  The intercept stations around Britain’s coastline continued to foster their own small and often eccentric little communities. One such was in the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold. ‘We lived and worked in a charming house, Stone House on Gun Hill,’ wrote Wrens veteran Margaret Smee. This grassy area included ‘a coastguard lookout’ and also had ‘a large gun trained out to sea’. Such weaponry was important; fittingly, given its name, Gun Hill had come under sporadic bombardment since the beginning of the war. And the German ships ploughing up and down the North Sea continued to pose a threat. In reading these Southwold accounts, one gets a strong sense of that juxtaposition of tea rooms, bathing huts, barbed wire and gun emplacements. ‘Captain Clack, who was in charge, had cleared some of the obstructions from the shore,’ wrote Margaret Smee. This meant that ‘his men could bathe and we were allowed to bathe here too.’ But there was also a semblance of military life. ‘One of his officers instructed us in how to use a rifle, which only got as far as lying on the dining room floor in the correct position.’

  Smee was promoted to Second Officer and a ‘new watchroom and tower’ were built a short distance away from Stone House. No matter how agreeable the town and the coastline, the work here as elsewhere was never less than arduous and highly pressurised. ‘We took it in turns to do night duty and had a small summer house to sleep in, before continuing up there until lunch-time next day. This was fine in summer but in winter quite freezing. I never knew before that it took so much snow to make a cup of tea!’1

  Sybil Welch remembered the Southwold base as ‘a pleasant, rambling family house by the sea’. She wrote that it ‘was a very nice US Air Force major of our acquaintance who coined the phrase “people in Stone Houses shouldn’t throw glass”.’ And to make up for the gruelling nature of the work, there were – occasionally – extraordinary adventures. Welch recalled the night when a USAF Flying Fortress flew in from a raid, ‘crippled and on fire’:

  Two of the crew baled out, their parachutes open, into the sea in front of us. The coast guards had been alerted but we were closer. Two of us set off down the beach – which was, incidentally, mined – and helped one of the airmen out of the water and into our kitchen. He was of course given the inevitable cups of tea and wrapped in a warm, fluffy dressing gown belonging to our cook, who was fortunately a lady of ample proportions.

  A little way down the road was the Wrens listening station at the port of Harwich, Suffolk, which according to veteran Joy Hale was in many senses a terrific place to serve:

  The work was much more exciting as we were next to the Ops room and could see what was going on, and the port was full of ships and sailors and naval officers. There were lots of dances and parties. The Free French came and any French-speaking Wrens were invited to their dances. The Czechs were there too. It was a frivolous happy-go-lucky time and we thought little about the seriousness and the reality of war.

  Things were more serious further up the coast in Norfolk, remembered Hale. The station at Sheringham ‘stood on Beeston Hump, the highest piece of cliff in the neighbourhood’. And, she continued, ‘it was here for the first time I saw the whole intercept operation come together. We picked up E-Boat signals and identified the boats . . . we got a fix on them and quickly telephoned the information to the Intelligence Centre at Chatham.’ Thus alerted, Chatham contacted Coastal Forces. For Joy Hale, there was the satisfaction of hearing gunfire; ‘and going out on the cliffs,’ she wrote, ‘we saw the flashes of the “dust up” going on about four miles out . . . this was a textbook operation but it was only occasionally that everything worked out so precisely.’2

  Incidentally, as I write, I have in front of me on my desk my late grandfather’s wartime identity card. ‘National Service Acts accepted for Royal Naval Service,’ it reads. ‘R
egistration number BKR1167, Mr Herbert Swindlehurst, R.N. W/T Station, Gun Hill, Southwold, July 1943.’ Whatever the nature of the work he did there, he never told my mother, or indeed, as far as I can tell, my grandmother. A gentle man in the truest sense, he would have signed the Official Secrets Act, and would have had an acute sense of abiding by it. Born in 1901, as a young man my grandfather had found the science of wireless hypnotically fascinating; before the war he had travelled the world as the ‘sparks’ – the wireless operator – on various mighty ships and had seen and experienced very much more than even today’s gap-year travellers. When war was declared, he was thirty-eight years old and by the time he arrived at Southwold, he was forty-two. According to veterans such as Bob Hughes, this would have meant that he was regarded by other operatives as ‘old’; though having seen his Morse transcription skills in action in later life, I would like to think that he was still a great deal nimbler than most.

  And with German vessels hurling various lethal weapons at the Gun Hill station, life in Southwold could hardly have been described as the quiet option. It was very much in Britain’s front line: local troops destroyed the end of the pier in order to prevent Germans making a landing there. Low-flying German aircraft dropped enormous bombs. In 1943, a lone aircraft which, unlike the others, had managed to sweep in under the radar, unloaded a 1000 lb bomb which almost destroyed one street. At the start of the war, London evacuee children had been sent to Southwold; soon, they had to be evacuated out again. And the town was closed to holidaymakers. There were incendiary bombs and even, a little later, stray doodlebugs. So while being beside the coast had its aesthetic compensations, there was little in the way of tranquillity for the secret listeners.