Security was a most important part of the operations. Bad security would not only prejudice the lives of 34 men but also make a further attack more difficult should this one fail. The Field Security detachment which accompanied the force until take-off never once heard a whisper of the real intentions of the raid.
The plant was later sabotaged in Operation Gunnerside by Norwegian SOE and made famous by the film The Heroes of Telemark. Equally famous was the ‘Shetland Bus’, a small fleet of trawlers and, later, well-armed US stormchasers, that delivered stores and agents to Norway and often returned with refugees. One Norwegian naval lieutenant using the ‘Bus’ sometimes visited his wife and is said to have become a father.
By February 1943, Fyffe, now promoted to major, had been appointed the SOE Chief Security Officer in Scotland and, for the next year, maintained a punishing weekly routine that began with him leaving Inverlair at about 3.00am on Monday, catching the early ‘milk run’ ferry at North Queensferry and spending the day at Rothesay Terrace in Edinburgh, where a FS detachment of two officers and four NCOs supported the Norwegians by maintaining links with Scottish Command so that its activities merged with SOE training. Returning to Inverlair on Tuesday night, next day he visited the detachment at the Norwegian lodge at Drumintoul and was back in Inverlair by Thursday night, ready to visit Arisaig on Friday. Saturday morning was Commanding Officer’s parade and Sunday a ‘free’ day. In February 1944, he was replaced by Captain Samuel Darby, a former Winchester School Classics teacher, and appointed as Chief Security Officer, Military Operations No. 1 (Planning School), Scotland, which included him taking responsibility for 49 FSS before it departed for the invasion of Europe. He was also involved in the training of uniformed Jedburgh teams to be parachuted to support Resistance groups during and after the invasion of Europe.
By the autumn of 1942, the stringent, almost obsessive, physical security measures of SOE instigated by Captain Norman Mott, had surpassed even the minimum standards set by the War Cabinet Panel of Security, much to the irritation of some senior officers when asked to produce their identity passes. But, to some extent, it had been at the cost to effective operational security within the Country Sections exposed to German counter-intelligence operations and the danger from penetration of SOE by agents ‘gone sour’. The fashion designer, and later Dress Maker to the Queen, Major Hardy Amies was Head of T (Belgian) Section Head in 1943. A former factory manager in Germany and fluent in French and German, he had joined the Section in 1941 when it was under severe pressure from German counter-intelligence. Observations by Field Security that a mechanic training to be a wireless operator had displayed weaknesses for drink, money and women were ignored and soon after parachuting into Occupied Belgium, he was arrested with a woman in a hotel that was frequented by the Gestapo. His inability to resist interrogation led to eighteen people being shot. The first inkling that there might be a problem surfaced in mid-September 1942 when MI5 considered ‘playing back’ a wireless operator in Belgium known to be in German hands. When it was then suspected that the operator may not be the only one, much to the irritation of the Country Sections, M15 adopted a policy of assuming that returning agents had been compromised. Pilot Officer Cyril Miller, who tested agent cover stories before they departed and had interrogated some returning agents in the new Security ‘Grill Room’, then suggested that all should be debriefed. When the Belgian Government-in-exile refused to support the T Section Operation Ratweek of assassinating collaborators, Major Amies ignored its views and, in November 1943, despatched his best agents in Operation Tybalt, which also saw the Resistance preventing the Germans from carrying out demolitions in Antwerp port in November 1944.
SOE operations in occupied Europe are controversial, even today, none more so than during the period when Major Charles Blizard was Head of N (Netherlands) Section between December 1941 and February 1943. Prior to his arrival, when Field Security had noted several indiscretions involving a student named Arnoldus Albert Baatsen, including spotting him with a woman in Hertford, after he had applied for leave in Cambridge, Captain Lee concluded that he was unreliable and recommended that he be sent to the ‘Cooler’, largely because his colleagues no longer trusted him. However, he was held at the Field Security Headquarters in Kingston and, although Colonel Gubbins was warned about his indiscretions, Blizard turned these into strengths. When Baatsen was dropped into Holland on 27 March 1942, he was welcomed by a German reception party. Unknown to London and three weeks before Blizard arrived, two agents had been captured along with their wirelesses, codes and information and were transferred to Abwehr Major Hans Giskes. He convinced the wireless operator to transmit, but his secret codes indicating that he was transmitting under duress were ignored or not recognized, not an uncommon lapse. For the next two years, Giskes, in the deception Operation North Pole dubbed Englandspiel (England Game), he fooled N Section into believing that all was under control in Holland. Opinions still differ about the extent of the success of Englandspiel; however, research by MRD Foot, the distinguished military historian, suggests that between March 1941 and August 1943, the Abwehr operated eighteen wireless lines to England and through them organized 190 supply drops. These included 15,200 kilogrammes of explosives, 3,000 Sten guns, 300 Bren guns, 5,000 pistols, 2,000 hand grenades, seventy-five wireless sets, three ground to air Eureka wireless direction finders and 500,000 rounds of ammunition. Only eight agents survived. Eleven aircraft were shot down with the loss of eighty-three aircrew. Hundreds of civilians were compromised. Even after two Dutch agents escaped from prison and reached Switzerland in August 1943, their warnings were disregarded, indeed they were briefly imprisoned when they returned to England on suspicion of being German spies. Up to October 1943, N Section despatched fifty-six agents of whom forty-three were captured on landing. Thirty-six were executed at Mauthausen concentration camp in September 1944.
In late June 1943, in the midst of the disaster, Captain Dick Kragt of MI9, whose father was Dutch, was dropped ‘blind’ on the third attempt, with orders to extend the ‘Comet’ escape line from France through Belgium into Holland. He landed in a smart suburb of Deventer, not into the open countryside he had expected, and was separated from the equipment canister. It was handed to the Germans. By September, more than 100 aircrew had been passed down the line. On 1 April 1944, Giskes added insult to injury to N Section by sending a signal admitting the deception.
Three months after SOE issued ‘Interrogation of Returned Agents’, which stated that the ‘Grill Room’ would debrief agents before they were debriefed by the Country Sections, in March 1943 Major Richard Warden, who had been a SOE Field Security Officer since February 1941 and had been a liaison officer with Travel Control Security and MI5, formed the Special Security Section of interrogators in Bayswater. Its aim was to enforce operational security and demonstrate to other intelligence and security agencies that SOE was taking its responsibilities seriously. But the continued unwillingness of the Country Sections to follow the Instruction and the failure of the French to notify that a returning agent had ‘gone sour’ resulted in further MI5 protests. With the growing number of agents being sent to Europe, Warden ceased testing cover stories and instead allowed those claiming not to have been in contact with the enemy to write a report before interrogation. But passive resistance by the Country Section continued to compromise matters by continuing to debrief agents, who claimed not to have fallen into enemy hands. By mid-1943, as the Second Front took shape, investigations by Senter and Warden, now responsible for operational security, began investigating the Abwehr penetration of the Dutch and sent an instruction to the Country Sections that Bayswater must be informed of all agents known or thought to have contact, and/or be working, with the enemy. Operational Security was further tightened when the practice of agents taking personal mail to families was replaced by a postcard of no more that thirty-six words with conducting officers expected to search agents and their clothing and equipment before departure, in order to prevent lea
kages of information. All mail brought from Europe was censored.
SOE operations in France were the most extensive but were blighted by internal and external politics, largely between the Gaullist Free French and communists. The two main Sections were F (France) Section run by the British and RF (Republique Francaise) Section of the Free French. The smaller EU/P Section was associated with the Polish community in France. DF Section organized escape lines. Major Maurice Buckmaster, who had transferred from T (Belgian) Section, was noted for giving the women agents gold powder compacts and the men gold cuff links or a gold fountain pen, all of which had pawn value. The years 1941 and 1942 were spent developing the networks, or Circuits, initially in southern France, where German counter-intelligence was less active. Seven months after the first agent dropped into France, in January 1942, Lieutenant Peter Churchill landed from a submarine in Miramar in Vichy France to assess the feasibility of landing agents from the sea and returned to Gibraltar via Spain three weeks later. Born in Amsterdam, he had been an intelligence officer in York and a commando before transferring to SOE. Five weeks later he landed on the Riviera coast with orders to support the Acrobat Circuit, based around Chalons-sur-Saone west of the Swiss border, and Professor Circuit, with equipment and to organize agent reception. In August, Churchill parachuted ‘blind’ near Montpellier to join the Carte Circuit near Cannes and was joined, in October, by Odette Sansom (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), a French mother of three daughters who had arrived in England in 1931. However, their flamboyant lifestyle attracted some disapproval from the Resistance. Churchill returned to England by Lysander in March 1943 and then returned to France as the senior liaison officer for a sabotage group in Spindle Circuit near Cannes. The same aircraft that then extracted him, delivered the inspirational Captain Francis Cammaerts, who had been a conscientious objector and farm labourer until his brother was killed while serving with the RAF and he had been convinced by his friend Captain Harry Ree to join the Executive. Born to Danish and American parents and employed as a teacher after graduating from Cambridge and London Universities, Ree registered as a conscientious objector in 1939 and became a fireman until, in 1941, he accepted conscription and joined a Field Section attached to SOE. Ree’s brother, Eric, was also in the Intelligence Corps and is thought to have helped Major Lee form 300 FSS. He was killed in a motorcycle accident in Algeria in November 1943.
Soon after landing by parachute near Annecy on 14 April, Churchill and Sansom were arrested in a hotel by Sergeant Hugo Bleicher, an experienced counter-intelligence officer, and were transferred to the formidable Fresnes Prison on the outskirts of Paris, where they stuck to their story of being married and Churchill claimed to be a nephew of Winston Churchill, a fabrication that helped him survive several concentration camps. Although condemned to death in June 1943, Sansom survived Ravensbruck concentration camp and was awarded the George Cross for gallantry. They had a tempestuous post-war marriage that lasted eight years.
By 1943, Stalin was agitating for a second front in Europe to take the pressure off the Red Army; however, the British and Americans knew that it would a year before sufficient troops were available. Meanwhile, when the Chief of Staff Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC) devised the deception Operation Cockade to alleviate the pressure on Soviet and Allied operations in the Mediterranean by suggesting landings could take place in either Norway or the Pas-de-Calais or Brest, the SOE was instructed to ramp up operations in France. One of those sent was Henri Déricourt, the F Section air operations officer. The increase in activity led to MI6 becoming anxious because intelligence was also required. Also concerned was Colonel Karl Boemelburg, Head of the Gestapo in Paris, where the Prosper Circuit was the largest and most well organized, and largely untouched because Déricourt was feeding him information about Resistance operations in exchange for not interfering with supply drops. During the night of 15/16 June, Captain John Macalister, a short-sighted Canadian Rhodes Scholar married to a Frenchwoman and who had served with 64 FSS, and Captain Frank Pickersgill (Canadian Intelligence Corps) dropped north of Valency with orders to develop the Prosper Circuit based in Sedan. Pickersgill had escaped from a labour camp in 1940 after being detained as an enemy alien.
As the threat of invasion increased, the Germans could not remain inactive and, on 21 June, armed with credible intelligence, Boemelburg struck with widespread arrests and captured a wireless operator. On the same day, Macalister and Pickersgill and two members of the Resistance were arrested at a Waffen-SS check point in Dhuizonin, in possession of their wireless and security checks written on the back of an envelope as they were about to catch the Paris train at Beaugency. Interrogated at SD Headquarters at 84-86 Avenue Foch, Paris, they knew their security checks had been compromised, however the wireless expert SD-Lieutenant Doctor Josef Goetz was keen to exploit their wireless but was restricted in that every message he proposed to transmit was vetted by SS HQ in Berlin. He placed Pickersgill in solitary confinement with no recreation until a ‘friendly’ warder gave him a Morse key pad, which he began to tap to relieve the boredom, unaware that in the neighbouring cell was a German signals corporal analyzing his method.
For weeks, F Section ignored absent and incorrect security checks and continued to drop weapons, equipment and supplies. It eventually became suspicious and when it asked questions that only Pickersgill could answer, he was returned to Avenue Foch. In the cell block he met another Intelligence Corps agent, Captain John Starr, who told him that the Germans knew all about F Section and therefore it was best to co-operate. Starr had dropped into France on his second mission in May 1943 and seems to have been one of three agents attempting to convince the Germans that they presented no threat. When Pickersgill was offered a drink by a German, he broke the bottle on a table, stabbed two Germans and jumped from the second floor but was shot several times by an alert sentry. In February 1944, Déricourt returned to England and admitted passing information on the grounds of it being to use Luftwaffe airspace but the German counter-stroke cost about 400 Prosper Circuit resisters. After the war, when Buckmaster was heavily criticised for his control of F Section, he defended himself by saying ‘There is no point trying to do things by the book, when there is no book’.
In April 1943, Captain Ree was operating with the Acrobat Circuit when he noted that an air raid on the Peugeot factory near Montbéliard, manufacturing tank parts, had caused more damage to the town than the factory. With the public impatient at the damage, he convinced Rudolph Peugeot that sabotage was equally effective; however, German counter-intelligence operations in the summer forced him to escape to Switzerland, where he was briefly interned. When Ree was given authority to sabotage the factory, saboteurs entered the factory during the night of 3 November but they inserted the detonators into the explosive upside down. Rectifying the error the next night, the explosions put the factory out of action. Although Gestapo investigations were largely ineffective, Ree was in a safe house three weeks later when he shot a military policeman in civilian clothes sent to arrest him but he was wounded in the struggle and was smuggled into Switzerland. The sabotage to the factory continued; however, the cost in men, women and children in arrests was high. The US officer who replaced him was shot. In 1944, Ree starred in the film Now it Can be Told (aka School for Danger) which was produced by the RAF Film Unit telling the story of SOE in France.
Due to the inherent dangers, X (Germany and Austria) Section, controlled by Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Thornley, collaborated with the German Section, Political Warfare Executive and focused on black propaganda and administrative sabotage. After D-Day, when Major General Templer was Director of Military Intelligence, Thornley was his deputy. Captain Francis Boothroyd joined the Section in 1943 and was involved in the Operation Foxley feasibility studies to assassinate Hitler. From 1942 to 1943, the Czechs ran their own training school at Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire and carried out several operations, the most well known being Operation Athtropoid, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.
Their chief instructors were two Intelligence Corps officers, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Wilkinson and Major Alfred Hesketh-Pritchard, the latter an expert as a sniper, with a wireless and as a saboteur. In 1943, he was part of the Clowder Mission sent to contact resistance groups in Eastern Europe but was killed in December 1944 while crossing into Austria from Slovenia, probably by Yugoslav Partisans rejecting agreement that the British would occupy Austria.
CHAPTER NINE
Great Britain 1940–1945
Fortune favours the prepared mind
Sir Alexander Fleming
As the war progressed, Great Britain became a huge Allied barracks, aircraft-carrier and naval base with villages, fields and beaches requisitioned for the training of the US forces and 21st Army Group for the invasion of Europe. Meanwhile, Coastal Forces attacked enemy convoys, Combined Operations launched commando raids, RAF fighter sweeps raided German installations and SOE set Europe ablaze. .
Using the basic security principle that prevention is preferable to investigation, by 1944 the Field Security sections had collectively dealt with an estimated 7,000 incidents of suspicious activity since 1940, including attempts to access information and equipment. Soldiers professing fascist and pacifist sympathies, but not communism because the Soviet Union was an ally, and readers of the anarchistic War Commentary were investigated, as were Irish soldiers joining the war effort at risk of subversion by the IRA and disgrace from a mean government in Dublin. Intelligence Corps NCOs in civilian clothes frequented clubs, pubs and dances used by off-duty soldiers to identify subversives and agents, a practice that lasted until the 1980s. When Rudolph Hess was about to be transferred to Mytchett House after his controversial flight to Scotland, it was FS NCOs who reported the local rumours. Security awareness training educated while sections tested the efficiency of sentries, guardrooms and barracks perimeter patrols by attempting to breach defences. Counter-intelligence and security cover supported research and development; for instance, 50 FSS and the military police controlled access to several inland lakes and Camber Sands beach, near Rye, when Duplex Drive Sherman swimming tanks were being developed for D-Day. Another section covered the development and construction of the prefabricated Mulberry Harbours that became crucial to supplying the invasion forces.
Sharing the Secret Page 18
