Sharing the Secret
Page 5
Tough and often unfair it was, but the majority of us were having to mix with the ‘brutal, licentious soldiery’ and find ourselves advisers to brigade and regimental commanders. The British Army has always had its expertise on the cheap. There was a deep suspicion among the regular officers of the ‘Pansy Resting on its Laurels’. To be able to demonstrate a smart, soldierly bearing… before one revealed the simple arts of intelligence was the best possible introduction to the inevitably more senior and experienced officers to whom we had to report. So no disrespect to the Depot staff, with its band of gentle dug out officers and supernatural guardsmen
Between December 1941 and October 1945, Brigadier J.W. Jervois MC (Northamptons) was Inspector of Intelligence Training and Commandant for the Special Military Intelligence Wing, which became a model for overseas Intelligence Schools and Depots and the Control Commission School for Occupied Germany, Austria and Italy after 1945.
While the Army moved into defensive positions, the RAF defended the skies and the Royal Navy patrolled the North Sea and English Channel. Guarding the Nation’s gates were Home and Port Security and Field Security sections supported by MI5 Port Control Officers, Security Control Officers so that every port, harbour and airport was covered. The Port Security Mobile Unit provided reinforcements and an audit role. By early 1941, fifty Home Port Security sections, numbered in the 100 Series, had been raised, however their unit histories are sparse. The greatest number of decorated soldiers were in 115 HPSS – a Distinguished Conduct Medal, three MMs and a Meritorious Service Medal. Company Sergeant Major V.C.L. Evans, MC, Croix de Guerre (Belgium), aged 60 years and a former First World War Major, owned a shipping company. In September 1939, 119 HPSS was raised from former employees of Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight, Birkenhead. The designations of others reflected collectively their responsibilities, for example, ‘HPSS Bristol Channel Ports’ and ‘HPSS Clyde Control’. Covering the points and airports efficiently relied on effective working relationships with Customs and Excise, the Royal Navy, Merchant Navy and shipping and airline agents. All vessels entering British waters in convoys, flying flags of convenience and neutrality, hospital ships and fast liners making lone dashes were vetted by Port Security Section detachments of, usually, a sergeant and three corporals/lance corporals. Particular attention was paid to ships and aircraft arriving from Ireland, Portugal and South America and to seamen who had signed on in neutral ports. Inevitably, there were accusations of undue delay. A detailed register of merchant seamen was developed. by MI5. Its Central Security War Black List was also collated from a variety of sources, including refugees and lists maintained by governments-in-exile. Anyone proving to be a problem was transferred to Immigration. After Dunkirk, FSS were also deployed on Port Security duties. Generally more than one would cover large ports while smaller harbours were monitored by deploying detachments controlled from a section headquarters in a larger port.
After graduating from Sheerness, Lance Corporal Charles Crisp joined 46 FSP in Plymouth in June. It had been formed in June from NCOs evacuated from Dunkirk and newly-recruited soldiers and had detachments at Torquay, Brixham, Salcombe and Dartmouth. Plymouth Sound was a disembarkation port for the two Polish divisions evacuated from France before they were sent to camps for counter-intelligence screening. British and foreign arrivals were bewildered by the quarantining of their pets. One Italian lady left France as a neutral and arrived as an enemy alien. Soon after Crisp arrived, he and another lance corporal were given a revolver, but no ammunition, and struggled up the rope ladder of a freighter to be told by the captain that he had just quelled a mutiny among his Chinese crew. Corporal Edward Canon, who was serving with 142 HPSS in Torquay, and his wife and two children were killed in an air raid in May 1944.
When, in January 1941, Lieutenant Colonel Davis was posted to a logistics appointment in HQ 5th Division, Lieutenant Colonel W.H. Brooks (South Lancashires), who had been Chief Instructor and Depot Commander, was appointed Assistant Commandant. Davis had played a significant role in the evolution of the Corps by developing Defence Security and organizing the moves from Mytchett to Sheerness to Winchester but his contribution to forming the Corps and preparing for war is largely unrecognized. By the time the Depot moved to Winchester, fifty-five officers and 715 other ranks had been formed into sixty Field Security sections. By the time he left, a further seventy-seven had been formed, giving a total of 137 sections with sixty-three in the Field Force, nine supporting Home Commands and fifty distributed among ports and airports in Great Britain. Thirteen were in the Middle East and two in East Africa.
At the War Office, the Directorate of Military Intelligence expanded to meet the global nature of the war by forming subsidiaries in all overseas Commands. Its eight departments in 1939 had increased to nineteen by 1942 with the Intelligence Corps widely represented to meet the burgeoning demand for intelligence and security. The Directorate consisted of:
The Director of Military Intelligence from 1940 to 1944 was Major General Francis Davidson. Commissioned into the Royal Artillery during the First World War, he had fought in France and Gallipoli and in 1939 had been the British Expeditionary Force Commander, Royal Artillery. He was a firm believer in the need for the Intelligence Corps and was Colonel Commandant between 1952 and 1960.
The principal Field Security opponent in Europe was the Abwehr. The Allies had demanded in 1918 that German intelligence must be defensive, however, by February 1938, the Foreign Affairs and Defence Office of the Armed Forces High Command (Amt Ausland und Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) emerged with a principally Human Intelligence remit. Generally known as the Abwehr, it was commanded by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris until he and several other officers were arrested after being implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Major Nikolaus Ritter controlled a small Luftwaffe unit that infiltrated agents into Great Britain, however so effective was the counter-intelligence that most agents were welcomed by MI 5 reception parties. The Abwehr was later absorbed into the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheithauptamt) or RHSA. Its counter-intelligence function was controlled by Reinhardt Heydrich until it was transferred to Ernst Kaltenbrunner after Heydrich was assassinated in 1942. Consisting of seven departments that included internal and external police intelligence and the criminal police, most feared was the Political Secret Police (Geheime Staats Polizei) commonly known as the Gestapo. Closely allied to the Gestapo was the Nazi Party intelligence organization, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD.
While the cryptographic organization at Bletchley Park provided strategic information to add to the overall intelligence picture, MI8 (Signals Intelligence) sponsored Special Wireless units intercepting and analyzing enemy battlefield communications traffic. Captured code books and cipher documents and the interrogation of signallers often helped targeting. When, in 1939, the three Service Directors of Intelligence believed that their Y Services should remain under their respective controls and that crypto-analysis should be centralized at Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cipher School disagreed. Within three months, however, the regular decoding tactical Enigma traffic led to the School recognizing the value of the Y Services. The principal Army intercept platform was at Fort Bridgeworks, Chatham until it was bombed in 1941 and was moved to RAF Chicksands Priory – the first time that the Corps was associated with its current Headquarters. However, Chicksands proved unpopular and in March 1941, as No. 6 Intelligence School, it moved to Beaumanor Hall, Quorn. The eventual centralization of the Y Services at Bletchley led, in 1942, to several Intelligence Corps at Beaumanor being told they had joined a branch of MI8 known as The Central Party and were to analyze German military communications. In June, the Central Party moved to Bletchley Park where Captains Edward Crankshaw and James Blair-Cunynghame played a significant role in its development, so that by 1943 it had become a large organization collecting detailed knowledge of German wireless networks, all without a decoding room.
About 850 Intelligence Corps are thought to have ser
ved at Bletchley Park. The 910 women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service attached to the Corps provided clerks, draughtswomen, cipher operators and intercept analysts. Staff Sergeant Elaine Deacon arrived in January 1943 and was employed in the Direction Finding Unit. Billeted in Fenny Stratford, she was among the hundreds using the enormous canteen where famous artists, actors, composer, newsreaders and unknown scientists and academics mingled with sailors, soldiers and airmen. Bletchley Park eventually became overcrowded and the uniformed elements were moved to the neighbouring Shenley Road Military Camp where the women were accommodated in large huts fitted with stoves belching acrid smoke. Some found the conditions so deplorable that they slept outside on their groundsheets under a gas cape. Deacon described the change as ‘Far from being privileged people selected for our “special qualifications”, we became literally part-time prisoners of war’.
The observations of captured British servicemen collated by the Directorate of Military Intelligence during the First World War proved a very useful source of information on such matters as the effects of bombing, unit locations and civilian morale. MI9 (British Prisoners), originally No. 9 Intelligence School, was formed in December 1939 to collect information and facilitate escape and evasion by supplying equipment, such as silk maps and mini compasses in Red Cross parcels sent to prison camps. Codes were taught to selected servicemen, the majority being aircrew, and as early as November 1940, the first messages were being passed. Eventually virtually every German and Italian prison camp had prisoners passing encrypted information in letters to notional friends – in fact MI9. Prison camp security officers often had difficulty in breaking the codes.
The board games manufacturer, John Waddington Ltd, played an important role by printing and concealing maps printed on silk and compasses in the game pieces and inserting currency among Monopoly money. Games with smuggled goods were identified by a dot in the Free Parking square. It is estimated that more than a third of the 35,000 Allied who either escaped from camps or evaded capture, profited from the ingenuity of Waddington’s. To avoid compromising Red Cross parcels, games were sent as parcels from families.
When Quartermaster Sergeant John Brown (Royal Artillery) was captured at Dunkirk and transferred to the comfortable Stalag IIID near Berlin, it had become a source of recruits for the SS Legion of St George, also known as the British Free Corps, then being raised by John Amery, a naïve member of an establishment family who had remained in Vichy France after 1940. Placed in charge of prisoner administration and convincing the Germans that he sympathized with Amery, Brown was given substantial freedom that allowed him to collect information on German air defences and the location of an underground tank factory in the Berlin area. When Margery Booth, an English opera singer from Wigan married to a German and who achieved fame with the Berlin State Opera, gave several performances at the camp, Brown realized that she was loyal and used her as a letter box to send information to MI9. She was eventually arrested but escaped from prison. Her courage was not recognized for many years. She died, aged 47 years, in the United States. Letters to prisoners held in Japanese prison camps were so precious that MI9 was hardly involved except to facilitate escapes. Captain Derek Hooper, a Chinese speaker who joined the British Army Aid Group, a MI 9 sub-unit in China, was involved in organizing the escapes and evasions of about 1,880 Allied servicemen and collected intelligence, primarily from Hong Kong. Other Intelligence Corps members of the Group were Sergeant Ronald Yao Pang and Jemadars Nazar Hussein and Khushi Mohammed of Intelligence Corps (India).
The interception and censorship of correspondence to prevent military, social and economic intelligence inadvertently or deliberately falling into enemy hands is a centuries-old counter-intelligence practice. Moral issues about denying the correspondents’ privacy is countered by the need to protect national and operational secrecy. MI12 (Censorship) played a crucial role in organizing the interception of parcels, letters, telegrams and post cards, particularly those purporting to be between pen pal exchanges. Letters written by Service personnel were censored at unit level.
The Intelligence Corps provided linguists and analysts at Base and forward censor sections, Code sections, Special Mails Sections in operational theatres and at Allied prison camps. Sometimes suspect correspondence was discreetly inspected in order not to compromise counter-intelligence investigations. A host of codes were encountered from the simple marking of letters with tiny dots to the complexities of inserting codes. Messages concealed by German prisoners in which the encryption was governed by the regular sequence of letters were relatively easy to crack because the language word order is absolute and therefore deviations are quickly apparent. Occasionally, letters written in Braille would turn up. The last time that censorship at unit level is thought to have taken place was for a few days at Ascension Island during the 1982 Falklands Campaign.
In 1940, MI14 (Germany), commanded by Strong, now a lieutenant colonel, collated sufficient details on the deployments, organizations, personalities, uniforms and insignia and operational philosophies of the German ground forces, including the SS, and their allies to print two publications that were circulated to unit level:
The Order of Battle of the German Army – The Yellow Book The German Forces in the Field – The Brown Book
Auxiliary Territorial Service Captain Malcolm became so expert on the German order of battle that she advised the Pentagon and was awarded the US Legion of Merit. From 1942, Lieutenant Sherman, who wore the Intelligence Corps cap badge on her tunic with great pride, compiled comprehensive lists of German teachers and university lecturers, each graded according to their association with the Nazi Party. In 1940, MI14 suggested that if there was an invasion of Great Britain, the aim would be German global domination and therefore the use of gas and biological weapons could not be discounted. A consequence was that the British secretly manufactured gas artillery shells and mines. On 9 December 1943, after the Allied invasion of Italy, 38 FSS was on port security at Bari when fourteen ships were sunk during a night air raid, including a US Liberty ship. The imposition of a security blanket, on the direct orders of Prime Minister Churchill on the grounds that it was carrying mustard gas, lasted about five years.
Air Photographic Interpretation had proved vital from the earliest days of the First World War but the Army lost almost all its imagery at Dunkirk. When the RAF formed the Photographic Interpretation Unit at Wembley in September 1940, three experienced Army officers were invited to form the GHQ Home Forces Army Photographic Interpretation Section (APIS) as it prepared to contest Operation Sea Lion, the German invasion. Lieutenant Neil Falcon was the first of three Intelligence Corps to join the APIS, a nomenclature that would remain until 1967. A geological air surveyor who had worked in India and Burma, he had returned to England and had enlisted in the Local Defence Volunteers before attending the Photographic Interpretation course at Farnborough. After the APIS offices in Wembley were bombed in November 1940, the joint and larger Central Interpretation Unit reformed at RAF Medmenham, in Danesford House, a month later, where it remained until the late 1970s. Many Photographic Interpreters were selected from architects, archaeologists, geologists and surveyors, but for the Army it was an officer-only skill and it was not until some began failing the War Office commissioning board that it was opened to other ranks. In June, 1941 the APIS reformed into several sections and passing under command of the Directorate of Military Intelligence as MI15. Detachments were sent to all theatres of operations.
In addition to MI9, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence had responsibility of MI19 (Prisoner of War Intelligence). Capture is a battlefield risk but few prisoners recognize the psychological condition of ‘shock of capture’ and the fear of an uncertain future in the hands of foreigners. The hunt for intelligence begins during the search phase near the point of capture and the selection for interrogation is usually dependent on demeanour, status, influence and the results of searches. Most do not appreciate their value as intelligence resource
s; for instance, a staff car driver may be as important as a company commander. Some prisoners will undergo progressively detailed interrogation at specialized interrogation centres. The Manual of Military Intelligence (1946) Pamphlet No. 7 describes PW Intelligence (Enemy):
The object of interrogating enemy prisoners of war and deserters and civilian refugees is to acquire information about the enemy, which, together with information from other sources, will enable commanders effectively to assess the potentialities, and so plan the destruction, of the enemy.
Signed during the euphoria that followed the 1928 Kellog Pact outlawing war, the 1929 Third Geneva Convention (Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) protected prisoners against the inhumane treatment that many had suffered between 1914 and 1918. But several signatories were slow to sign; Germany in 1934, France in 1935 and Russia, reasoning that it had no accord with Switzerland, and Japan not at all. Under Article 5:
Every prisoner is required to declare, if he is interrogated on the subject, his true names and rank, or his regimental number… If he infringes this rule, he exposes himself to a restriction of liberties of the privileges accorded to prisoners of his category.