The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The Security Service’s intelligence, however, still carried little weight in the Foreign Office. In early April, Dick White, now Klop Ustinov’s case officer,121 visited the Foreign Office to deliver a warning from Putlitz that Italy was preparing to invade Albania. He was given a sceptical reception.122 At a cabinet meeting on 5 April Halifax discounted reports of an impending Italian invasion. Two days later, on Good Friday, Italy occupied Albania. After attending a three-hour Good Friday service Halifax met Cadogan and ‘decided we can’t do anything to stop it’.123 Chamberlain took the invasion as a personal affront. ‘It cannot be denied’, he wrote rather pathetically to his sister, ‘that Mussolini has behaved to me like a sneak and a cad.’124

  The limited impact of the Security Service’s intelligence on German policy reflected the broader confusion of British intelligence assessment. The Joint Intelligence Committee, set up in 1936 on the initiative of the Chiefs of Staff, had yet to establish itself, lacked an intelligence staff and was still largely ignored by the Foreign Office. The confusion of Easter 1939 when the Admiralty took seriously wholly unfounded intelligence reports of Luftwaffe plans to attack the Home Fleet in harbour, while the Foreign Office dismissed accurate warnings of the invasion of Albania, brought matters to a head. The Chiefs of Staff now demanded that, as a minimum response to current intelligence problems, all intelligence – both political and military – which required quick decisions should be collated and assessed by a central body on which the Foreign Office would be represented.125 Cadogan acknowledged that he was ‘daily inundated by all sorts of reports’ and found it virtually impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff. Even when he correctly identified accurate intelligence reports, ‘It just happened that these were correct; we had no means of evaluating their reliability at the time of their receipt.’ After the traumatic Easter weekend the Foreign Office gave way to service pressure for a Situation Report Centre (SRC) under a Foreign Office chairman which would assess intelligence and issue daily reports ‘in order that any emergency measures which may have to be taken should be based only on the most reliable and carefully coordinated information’.126 Two months later, the SRC proposed its own amalgamation with the JIC. In July the Foreign Office, hitherto only an irregular attender at the JIC, agreed to provide the chairman.127 There were, however, no overnight miracles. Serious improvement in intelligence assessment had to await the Second World War.

  There were also significant pre-war weaknesses in counter-espionage. The official history of British security and counter-intelligence in the Second World War by Sir Harry Hinsley and the former Deputy Director General of MI5, Anthony Simkins, published in 1990, makes the remarkable claim, since widely repeated, that before the war neither the Security Service nor SIS even knew the name of the main German espionage organization, the Abwehr, or of its head Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.128 In reality there are pre-war references to both the Abwehr and Canaris in MI5 records. The Service also referred to the Abwehr in liaison reports to the United States.129 Judging from pre-war MI5 and SIS records, however, in the mid-1930s both Services still regarded the Abwehr as first and foremost a counterespionage service.130 So far as Britain was concerned, this belief was broadly true. The Abwehr did not begin its transformation into a fully fledged foreign intelligence service until after the Nazi conquest of power,131 and, following the signature of the Anglo-German naval agreement in 1935, Hitler temporarily forbade the Abwehr to conduct espionage against Britain in order not to risk prejudicing further improvements in Anglo-German relations.132

  Though reduced in scale until reauthorized by Hitler in 1937, some German espionage in Britain continued.133 Among the Abwehr’s British agents was Major Christopher Draper, a First World War fighter ace who had won both the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre, had had a brief post-war career in the RAF (which still used military ranks) and subsequently became a stunt pilot and film actor. Draper’s penchant for flying under bridges (including Tower Bridge) earned him the nickname the ‘Mad Major’, which he later used as the title of his autobiography. In 1933, a year after meeting Hitler at a Munich air show, he was asked by the London correspondent of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter to provide intelligence on the RAF. Draper reported the approach to the Security Service and agreed to become a double agent – the first to operate against Germany since the First World War. In June 1933, with MI5’s approval, he travelled to Hamburg to meet his Abwehr case officer. For the next three years he sent disinformation prepared by MI5, disguised (as instructed by the Abwehr) as correspondence on stamp-collecting, to a cover address (Box 629) in Hamburg. Lacking the interdepartmental system for assembling disinformation developed for the Double-Cross System in the Second World War, however, MI5 began to run out of plausible falsehoods of interest to the Germans. By 1937 the Abwehr was expressing ‘grave dissatisfaction’ with the quality of Draper’s information. In the course of the year it broke contact with him.134

  By maintaining an HOW on letters to the Hamburg box number used by Draper to correspond with his case officer, the Security Service discovered that a Scottish hairdresser, Mrs Jessie Jordan, was being used by the Abwehr to forward correspondence to some of its foreign agents. In January 1938 an HOW on Jordan’s address led to the discovery of a letter from an Abwehr agent in the United States, codenamed CROWN, which contained details of a bizarre plot to chloroform and kidnap an American army colonel who had in his possession classified documents on US coastal defences. CROWN was identified as Guenther Rumrich, a twenty-sevenyear-old US army deserter, who was convicted with several of his accomplices in an Abwehr spy-ring at a highly publicized trial.135 As a result of US inter-agency confusion, others who had been indicted succeeded in escaping. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, and the prosecuting attorney blamed each other. The judge, to Hoover’s fury, blamed the FBI. Leon G. Turrou, the FBI special agent in charge of Rumrich’s interrogation, was so poorly briefed that he confused the Abwehr with the Gestapo.136

  Though the Security Service was far better informed than the FBI, there were large gaps in its understanding of the organization of pre-war German intelligence.137 Possibly the largest was its lack of awareness of the Etappe Dienst naval network, eventually discovered as a result of German records captured in 1945. Post-war analysis revealed that, though the pre-war Security Service had been unaware of the network to which they belonged, it had successfully identified a number of Etappe Dienst agents. Among them was Otto Kurt Dehn, who arrived in Britain in 1936 as managing director of a newly founded cinematographic film company, Emelco, despite – as B Branch noted when applying successfully for an HOW on him – having no previous experience in cinematography, film or advertising.138 When the Etappe Dienst was taken over by the Abwehr in 1939, it had a total of thirty-one agents operating against British targets.139 But most of these must have been visiting rather than resident agents, since, after a small number of arrests on the outbreak of war, it now appears that German intelligence had no significant agents operating in Britain, except for a British-controlled double agent and his three sub-agents.140 Some of the pre-war attempts by the Abwehr to obtain intelligence on RAF installations which were known to the Security Service probably provided information of value to the Luftwaffe. However, most of the German espionage detected by MI5 during the 1930s was, Curry later concluded, ‘run on a very crude basis’. Many of the agents provided ‘information of no importance in order to extract the maximum of reward for the minimum of effort’.141

  The Security Service remained understandably worried that ‘a cloud of agents of low quality served to hide a few good ones’ which it had failed to detect.142 One of the pre-war networks which most impressed MI5 when it was revealed by post-war interrogations was the Abwehr naval intelligence station in Bremen, which seems to have modelled its operations, at least in part, on those of the Etappe Dienst, using members of German steamship companies and other businessmen travelling from Bremen to the UK. Its head, Captain Erich Pfeiffe
r, was proud of what it achieved after its expansion in 1937. He claimed that there was much excitement in the Kriegsmarine when his agents discovered that the King George V class of battleships were to be fitted with quadruple gun turrets. Pfeiffer further claimed that intelligence from his agents had influenced the design of the anti-aircraft defences on the pocket battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst.143 Such claims are difficult to corroborate. The general impression created by the evidence currently available is that Pfeiffer ran a wellorganized Abwehr network, more remarkable for the quantity than for the quality of the intelligence it gathered. The file of one of Pfeiffer’s agents, Fritz Block, an engineer working for the Hamburg/Bremen Africa Line, contains 117 intelligence reports, with photographs, on British seaports, airports, industry, shipbuilding, warships, radio stations and troop movements, for which he was paid large amounts of money.144 It is highly unlikely, however, that any of Pfeiffer’s agents were actually in Britain when war began.

  By the outbreak of war, the Security Service had begun to operate a double agent against Nazi Germany who was to prove far more successful than Major Draper. The man whom MI5 considered the ‘fons et origo’ of what became known as the Double-Cross System was a Welsh-born electrical engineer codenamed SNOW who had emigrated to Canada as a child and returned to live in London. Early in 1936 he had begun to work part-time for SIS, reporting on his business visits to German shipyards. Later in the year, however, MI5 discovered a letter from SNOW during a routine check of correspondence addressed to Box 629, Hamburg, the Abwehr cover address previously used by Draper. When challenged, SNOW confessed that he had joined the Abwehr but claimed unconvincingly that he had done so only to penetrate it in the interests of SIS. His English interrogators condescendingly described him as ‘a typical Welsh “underfed” type, very short, bony face, ill-shaped ears, disproportionately small for size of man, ‘shifty look’. Though SNOW continued to supply SIS and MI5 with details of some of his dealings with the Abwehr, his ‘shifty look’ continued to inspire suspicion. T. A. ‘Tar’ Robertson, SNOW’s MI5 case officer, decided to leave him on a loose rein in the knowledge that, if war came, he could be arrested under emergency regulations. However much SNOW concealed from MI5, it is clear that he also defrauded the Abwehr, claiming to have at least a dozen sub-agents in England who, MI5 concluded, probably all ‘existed only in SNOW’s imagination’.145

  In August 1939 SNOW left for Hamburg in the company of his lover (an Englishwoman of German extraction) and a man whom MI5 believed he intended to recruit for the Abwehr. On 4 September, soon after his return to England, he arranged a meeting with a Special Branch inspector at Waterloo Station. To his surprise, he was served with a detention order and taken to Wandsworth Prison. Once in jail, SNOW quickly revealed that his radio transmitter was in the Victoria Station left-luggage office and offered to use it to communicate with the Abwehr under MI5 control. Robertson agreed. SNOW’s transmitter was installed in his cell and, after some difficulty, he succeeded in sending what proved to be a momentous message to his Abwehr controller, Major Nikolaus Ritter: ‘Must meet you in Holland at once. Bring weather code. Radio town and hotel Wales ready.’ The ‘weather code’, SNOW explained, was for transmitting the daily weather reports he was expected to send. The reference to Wales related to an assignment given him by Ritter to recruit a Welsh nationalist to organize sabotage in South Wales. Ritter quickly agreed to a meeting.146 Though of only minor importance at the time, the deception of the Abwehr begun in SNOW’s Wandsworth prison cell was eventually to grow into the Double-Cross System, which played a crucial role in the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944.

  Unknown to the Security Service, however, just as its deception of the Abwehr was beginning, the penetration of the SIS station in The Hague by German intelligence had begun to put at risk MI5’s most important source, Wolfgang zu Putlitz. In October 1938, a twenty-six-year-old Dutchman, Folkert van Koutrik, who was working as the trusted assistant of SIS’s head agent in the Netherlands, was turned by the Abwehr and worked thereafter as a double agent, submitting weekly reports which included details of British agents in the Netherlands and what the SIS station knew about German agents.147 Soon after the outbreak of war, Putlitz realized that the station had been penetrated and that he must accept Vansittart’s offer of asylum.148

  On the eve of war, however, Putlitz, still with no inkling that he was in danger, was in unusually confident mood, buoyed up by the belief that Britain was at last resolved to stand up to Hitler. Guy Liddell noted in his diary on 30 August:

  Klop has sent in a report which indicates that the Germans have got the jitters. It is rather a case of order, counter-order, disorder. There have been recriminations between Nazi Party and non-Party men. Non-Party men are saying: ‘We always told you that you get us into this mess, and you will be the first people to suffer for it.’ P[utlitz] has the impression that Hitler is on the run and that nothing should be done to provide him with a golden bridge to make his getaway.149

  Putlitz’s was one of a number of over-optimistic intelligence reports from various sources which reached Whitehall during the final days of peace, prompted by a delay in the planned German attack on Poland, which suggested that Hitler or his high command were having last-minute doubts about going to war. ‘I can’t help thinking’, Cadogan told his diary on 30 August, ‘[that the] Germans are in an awful fix. In fact it’s obvious even if one discounts rumours of disturbances.’ ‘It does seem to me’, he wrote at about midnight on 31 August, ‘[that] Hitler is hesitant and trying all sorts of dodges, including last-minute bluff.’150 A few hours later, at dawn on 1 September, German troops crossed the border into Poland and the last hopes of peace were dashed. Two days later Britain was at war.

  Section C

  The Second World War

  Introduction

  The Security Service and its Wartime Staff: ‘From Prison to Palace’

  During the first year of the Second World War the Security Service made what one of its staff called a transition ‘from prison to palace’.1 The prison was Wormwood Scrubs, the Service’s first wartime headquarters. Blenheim Palace, to which most staff transferred in October 1940, was the birthplace of Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister five months earlier. MI5’s arrival at the Scrubs on 27 August 1939, made necessary by the need for more wartime office space than was then available in Thames House, was so sudden that some staff found unemptied chamberpots in the cells which became their offices.2 Prisoners remained in several of the cell blocks and were sometimes seen exercising in the yard. ‘Don’t go near them,’ one of the warders warned female staff. ‘Some of them ain’t seen no women for years.’3 Other prisoners, however, had. The ex-public-school ‘Mayfair Playboys’, who had been imprisoned earlier in the year for robbing highclass jewellers, had danced with some Registry staff at debutantes’ balls during the London season.4 The Playboys’ leader, the twenty-two-year-old Old Etonian Victor Hervey, the future sixth Marquess of Bristol, was later said to have provided some of the inspiration for the ‘Pink Panther’.5

  The prison buildings, complained Milicent Bagot, ‘appeared never to have been ventilated since their erection and their smell was appalling.’6 The cell doors had no handles or locks on the inside. So, as one Wormwood Scrubs veteran recalls, staff ‘stood a good chance of being locked in by unwary visitors turning the outside door handle on leaving. At first there were no telephones in the cells, and with the rooms themselves soundproofed, it was possible for you to be shut in for hours before anyone noticed that you were not around.’7 The dreariness of the prison surroundings was reinforced by the strict secretarial economy measures ordered by Kell, in line with those implemented in the War Office: ‘Single spacing must be used, wide margins avoided, and both sides of the paper used whenever practicable. Quarto size paper must be used in the place of foolscap whenever this will effect economy.’8 A Branch sent further instructions on the conservation of used blotting paper, which, for security reasons, had hitherto
been destroyed at the end of every working day. Henceforth it was to be placed in a locked cupboard overnight and reused for as long as possible.9 In an attempt to maintain morale amid these straitened working conditions, Kell’s secretary arranged for a ladies’ hairdresser to visit the prison.10 Miss Dicker, the Lady Superintendent, also relaxed the previously inflexible female dress code. Because of the open prison staircases, visible from below, women were for the first time allowed to wear trousers.11 For the only time in MI5 history, the working day ended with the blowing of a bugle to remind staff to draw the curtains before the beginning of the night-time black-out.12

  Wartime restrictions were briefly suspended at Christmas. Constance Kell, who helped run the canteen, later recalled:

  We managed to have a Christmas dinner at the office canteen and another branch of our large community gave a Christmas party and presents were handed out . . . it was a real break in our busy days to have this gay afternoon – there was a splendid spirit everywhere, a spirit of camaraderie, which drew together the whole people . . . There was something about Kell himself that inspired that will to do and to help in every way possible.13

  Despite the personal affection he inspired in most staff and his wife’s rose-tinted recollections of Christmas in the Scrubs, Kell, though less than a year older than Churchill, was well past his best. By the outbreak of war he had been director for thirty years, longer than the head of any other British government department or agency in the twentieth century. Thirtysix years old when he founded the Service in 1909, he was nearly sixty-six when the Second World War began. In December 1938, having reached what he called ‘the respectable age of 65’ in the previous month, he wrote to Sir Alexander Cadogan, PUS at the Foreign Office and ex officio member of the (then inactive) Secret Service Committee, to ask, ‘in the interests of the Security Service, that something definite should be ordained with regard to my future’: ‘. . . I would suggest, if my work has been approved of, that my services should be retained on a yearly basis, provided I am compos mentis and do not feel the burden too heavy.’14