I feel that the bulk of the breakages must occur between the kitchen and the dining room and be attributable to the College staff.119
A minority of female staff, as Milicent Bagot later recalled, lived in greater comfort in nearby country houses:
One of our hostesses startled her billetees on their arrival, wearied by many sleepless nights in London, by enquiring whether any of them fished, shot or hunted. She herself went off regularly once a week for hunting. Her domestic staff included a butler, personal maid, cook and housemaid, as well as a girl especially detailed to look after the billetees. It was a strange world for most of us!120
MI5 defends itself against complaints that its female staff occupying rooms at Keble College, Oxford, destroy more crockery than the students.
Though the staff worked long hours, the office circulars at Blenheim provide evidence of a working environment unimaginable at the Scrubs. For example: ‘The practice of leaving bunches of flowers in the fire buckets militates against the efficiency of our fire fighting arrangements, and causes much extra work for the fire fighting staff. Will all members of the staff therefore please refrain from placing their flowers in the fire bucket.’121 Staff also had to be reminded about the rules of the road in the Palace grounds:
A great deal of horn-blowing, mud-splashing and general confusion would be avoided if both pedestrians and car-drivers would conform to the normal rule of the road, viz where no footpath is provided, pedestrians should walk on the RIGHT hand side of the road, so as to face oncoming traffic, while car-drivers should proceed on the LEFT hand side of the road. Car owners are also reminded that in order to avoid excess damage to the drive and unnecessary splashing of pedestrians, a speed limit of 10 MPH is in force in the Palace Grounds.122
In addition to swimming, tennis and cricket in summer, as one member of staff recalled:
There was plenty of entertainment in the evenings for those who wanted it . . . There were lists that you could sign should you wish to be what was called a ‘hostess’ at parties given by the RAF and the American [Army] Air Force stationed at the many airfields near by; we were usually picked up, and of course returned, in a five (or was it a ten) ton lorry. We were herded like cattle on benches at the back all in our finery for an evening out. As the lorries were far from clean, we feared that our own dresses, skirts etc would be ruined and stained before we even got to the party. On arrival, there was certainly no shortage of drink, the one idea was to get us, shall we say, more than merry.123
At Blenheim Palace, the Security Service had its first royal visitor, Queen Mary (widow of George V), who was shown round by the Duke of Marlborough, but disconcerted staff by ‘looking through’ them.124 Other visitors included Winston Churchill, who was an occasional weekend guest of his cousin the Duke.125 As one member of staff wrote:
Churchill was born in the downstairs room where Constant and Mounsey had their office. These two ladies (no one would call them girls) gave us our monthly salary in pound notes in envelopes (‘no lady talks about her pay’ we were told). New faces appeared on the staff. Strange Mr Croft-Murray with the booming voice started up a little orchestra which gave lunchtime concerts. He was once seen playing the violin in an open car as it sped along near Marlow . . . The first time I saw Lord Rothschild (Sabotage section) must have been a Sunday morning. He was wearing an open neck shirt and carrying a leather holdall. I thought he was a plumber until he asked the way in beautiful educated English.126
Despite the dramatic improvement in working conditions at Blenheim, during the early months administration remained confused, further complicated by the need to ferry files to and fro between the Palace and the St James’s Street headquarters. Confidence in Jasper Harker’s leadership continued to decline. The controversy over the release of a majority of the internees also continued. The leadership of the Security Service knew that despatch of a new wave of Abwehr agents to Britain which began in September had been intended as part of the preparations for a German invasion,127 and feared that freed internees might assist the invading forces. The Service objected to 111 of the 199 cases in which the Advisory Committee on Internment recommended the release of British Fascists interned under Defence Regulation 18B. At a meeting of the Security Executive on 6 November, however, it was forced to back down and, faced with opposition from both Swinton and the Home Secretary, dropped its objections to all but fifteen cases.128 By the end of 1940 almost a third of enemy alien internees had been released.129
Churchill complained to the Foreign and Home Secretaries on 25 January 1941 that ‘the witch-finding activities of MI5 are becoming an actual impediment to the more important work of the department.’130 This harsh criticism was coloured by the Prime Minister’s more general unease at the state of the Security Service. In late November he had received a cryptic handwritten letter from an old political ally, Baron Croft of Bournemouth, Parliamentary Under Secretary for War in the House of Lords, reporting that all was not well ‘in certain quarters’ and urging him to send for Major Gilbert Lennox, MI5’s liaison officer with military intelligence, and ask him to speak freely. ‘Do not consult anyone,’ he added.131 After retiring from the Indian army in 1932 at the age of fortyfour, Lennox had begun a successful new career as a playwright. His pre-war play Close Quarters, about a left-wing couple who commit suicide after being wrongly accused of the assassination of a Fascist dictator, had been a hit in the West End and also played more briefly on Broadway. Lennox joined the Service at the outbreak of war on the recommendation of Jane Archer and Dick White. In Archer’s view, as well as being ‘a playwright of some standing’, Lennox was ‘an extremely “hearty soul” . . . a man of the world, shrewd and of sound judgement with a taking manner’.132 Harker’s decision to sack Archer in November 1940 probably brought to a head Lennox’s dissatisfaction with the management of the Security Service.133 Lennox was taken aback, however, to be summoned to see Churchill on 26 November.134
When shown into the Prime Minister’s study, Lennox explained his views about MI5 and the Security Executive. He was then further taken aback to be asked by Churchill why he had come, and replied, ‘Because you sent for me.’ Churchill said that he left such matters to his intelligence adviser, Major Desmond Morton, and sent Lennox to see Morton in his room in Number Ten.135 Lennox told Morton that the Service was suffering from inadequate leadership and internal jealousies. On Churchill’s instructions, Morton then consulted the directors of intelligence in the three armed services. He reported to the Prime Minister on 3 December that the directors believed the Security Service was close to collapse, that Harker was not up to the job, and that Swinton’s ‘executive control’ of the Service was unsatisfactory. In their view, MI5 required a strong civilian, non-political head who would report to a minister, not to Swinton. By this time the former Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, then Lord President, had taken the initiative in commissioning an inquiry into the Security Service from the former head of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau and chairman of the Indian Public Service Commission, Sir David Petrie, a sixty-year-old Scot.136 Petrie was also asked if he would be willing to take over from Harker. But, he wrote later, ‘I refused outright to take charge until I had examined things for myself.’137 Once he had completed his review, Petrie agreed to take charge.
Petrie’s report, completed on 13 February 1941, concluded, unsurprisingly, that the rapid and poorly planned wartime expansion of the Security Service had led to organizational breakdown and confusion, best exemplified in B Division, which currently had 133 officers distributed among twenty-nine sections, which were themselves divided into approximately seventy to eighty sub-sections. Crocker’s appointment as joint head of the Division had only increased the confusion. Petrie strongly supported proposals (implemented after he took over) to lighten B Division’s load by moving ‘alien control’ (including internment issues) and countersubversion to, respectively, a new E Division and a new F Division (both based at Blenheim). His report also implied that giving Swinton
‘executive control’ of MI5 had been ‘an unfortunate mistake’. Outside interference had lowered MI5 morale.138 Before becoming director general in April 1941, wrote Petrie later, ‘I got the principle of the D.G. being master in his own house recognised and endorsed.’139 Kell and Harker had had the title of director; Petrie was the Service’s first director general.140 Harker, who stayed on as Petrie’s deputy, became deputy director general (DDG). Charles Butler, head of A Division (administration and Registry),141 Guy Liddell, head of B Division (counter-espionage), and H. I. ‘Harry’ Allen, head of C Division (mainly vetting) and D Division (protective security and travel control), were given the title of director. Theodore ‘Ted’ Turner, head of the new E Division, and Jack Curry, head of the new F Division, were made deputy directors.142
Dick White, Assistant Director of B Division when Petrie took over, later described the new Director General as ‘one of the best man managers I ever met’.143 Ashton Roskill agreed: ‘Solid in appearance and in mind, [Petrie] made it his business to know the essentials of his job, but did not hesitate to delegate. I doubt if he had more than a B+ mind but he used it, made few – if any – mistakes, and combined courtesy with firmness.’144 Norman Himsworth, an officer in Maxwell Knight’s section, remembered him as ‘A real gentleman. He would speak broad Scots when he was annoyed but perfect English when he was not.’145 Catherine Weldsmith (née Morgan-Smith), later the last lady superintendent, who was deputed to show Petrie around Blenheim, found him ‘very easy and nice about it – he was rather a shy man.’146 The DG was acutely security-conscious. One of the secretaries at St James’s Street recalls that ‘He always burned his own Top Secret stuff in a fire bucket.’147 Almost all accounts of Petrie’s appointment as DG agree with Curry that he ‘restored confidence – almost immediately internally and more gradually among the officers and Departments with whom [MI5] was in external relation . . .’148
By the autumn of 1941 the Security Service had completed an internal transformation as striking as the move of its main premises ‘from prison to palace’. Its resources on the eve of war – with only thirty-six officers and 133 secretarial and Registry staff – were below the level that would nowadays be considered necessary for a security service with such wide responsibilities and the reasonable expectation of a major enemy intelligence offensive to function at all. The Secret Service Committee had given no serious thought to its future leadership, allowing Kell to continue on a yearly basis as long as, in his own words, he remained ‘compos mentis’ in order to avoid having to take a longer-term decision. Its choice of Harker to succeed him in June 1940 appears to have been taken without any attempt to seek the views even of senior staff who would very probably have expressed some of the reservations which surfaced soon after he became director. During the first year of the war, even with effective leadership, the Service would have been unable to cope with the unreasonable demands made of it. What remains surprising is less that, by the time of Kell’s dismissal, as Curry acknowledged, MI5 had been reduced to ‘a state which can only be described as chaotic’ than that, over the next year, it achieved a total dominance over German intelligence which it retained for the rest of the war.149
The transformation of the Security Service was made possible, in part, by new leadership in the person of Sir David Petrie. At least equally important was the ability of a group of able pre-war officers – Guy Liddell, Dick White and Tar Robertson chief among them – to win the respect and harness the often remarkable talents of the wartime recruits. One of the keys to the Service’s wartime success from 1941 onwards was its esprit de corps. It was, recalled the Oxford historian Sir John Masterman a generation later, ‘a team of congenial people who worked together harmoniously and unselfishly, and among whom rank counted for little and character for much’.150 Though not all were as enthusiastic as Masterman,151 many were.152 An opinion survey by outside consultants in 2000 reported that 98 per cent of staff believed in the importance of their work and 87 per cent expressed pride in working for the Service – among the highest ratings the consultants had recorded inside or outside the public service.153 A similar survey in 1945 might well have produced a similar result. Even for Victor Rothschild, who had no shortage of glittering careers ahead of him, leaving the Service after the Second World War was a deeply emotional moment. He wrote to Petrie’s successor as DG, Sir Percy Sillitoe, who was appointed from outside:
I have been in the Security Service now for six years, and the idea of officially resigning from it is painful and distressing in a way which perhaps you, who have not seen much of us, may find difficult to understand. Most of the people who have been as intimately associated with it as I have been, have developed an affection for the Office as a whole and the staff in particular which I am certain is most unusual in a large Government Department.154
Few of the Security Service’s wartime successes were known to other government departments. The reasons for the Service policy of hiding its light under a bushel went some way beyond the demands of operational security. Petrie preferred to keep his contacts with Whitehall to a minimum. Two years after becoming director general, he admitted to Duff Cooper (Swinton’s successor as head of the Security Executive) that he was a bad ‘publicity merchant’ for the Service:
I have lived so long abroad that I had comparatively few contacts in London, and I never cared to extend them beyond what was necessary for business purposes. So it is a fact that many people, even some who ought to know better, have only the vaguest idea of M.I. 5 and what it does. This certainly does not hurt our work – quite the contrary – but it bears rather hardly on the department and the many able officers it comprises.155
Unlike Stewart Menzies, the Chief of SIS, Petrie made no attempt to forge a personal relationship with Churchill, though there was much about the Security Service’s wartime work which would have fascinated (and eventually did fascinate) the Prime Minister. Had Petrie briefed Churchill, he would have been able to counter dismissive comments by Desmond Morton, as late as 1943, that ‘MI5 tends to see dangerous men too freely and to lack that knowledge of the world and sense of perspective which the Home Secretary rightly considers essential.’156 At the very moment when Morton made this claim, MI5’s double agents were achieving unprecedented success in deceiving the enemy. It did not occur to Petrie to send Churchill a monthly report until Duff Cooper suggested it in March 1943.157
One of the few parts of Security Service work to come to Churchill’s attention from other sources was the extraordinary bravery of Victor Rothschild as head of its counter-sabotage department in defusing German bombs, meticulously recording his every move by field telephone in case he was killed in the attempt. (Rothschild owed much of his success to the expertise in micro-manipulation which he had acquired as a young zoologist at Cambridge University dissecting frogs’ eggs and sea-urchins.) But, when Churchill asked Petrie in February 1944 about Rothschild’s success in defusing a German bomb hidden in a crate of Spanish onions which was timed to explode in a British port, the DG’s response was so off-hand that it amounted to a brush-off – or, as Rothschild described it, ‘a raspberry’.158 The head of Churchill’s Defence Office, General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, replied that the Prime Minister would not be content with the information supplied and asked for more.159 When it was provided, Churchill took the personal decision to award Rothschild the George Medal.160
Petrie’s relations with Churchill were less successful than Kell’s had been thirty years before. Churchill’s willingness as home secretary in 1910–11 to make a major extension to the HOW system and his encouragement to chief constables to collaborate with Kell were crucial to the successes of MI5 counter-espionage before the First World War.161 Since Petrie regarded the early history of the Security Service as an irrelevance,162 he may well have been ignorant of Churchill’s important role in it. His reluctance to take the Prime Minister fully into his confidence during the Second World War, however, had some justification. Petrie probably believed
that, if Churchill knew more about Service operations, he might jump to hasty conclusions and interfere, as he did in the North African campaigns in 1941–2 when German decrypts convinced him that Rommel was much weaker than he was.163 Though Churchill’s enthusiasm for intelligence far exceeded that of any previous British prime minister, Petrie was right to be nervous about where that enthusiasm might lead him.164
1
Deception
The Second World War, like most of its predecessors, found Britain at best half ready. The War Office knew so little about Germany’s immediate plan of campaign that, misled by mistaken intelligence reports over the past year,1 it feared the Luftwaffe would attempt an immediate ‘knock-out blow’ against London. At 11.27 on the morning of Sunday 3 September, barely a quarter of an hour after the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had broadcast the news that the nation was at war, air-raid sirens wailed over the capital. War Office staff in Whitehall from top brass to junior clerks filed down to the air-raid shelter in the basement. There they listened apprehensively to a series of muffled explosions above them which a former military attaché with first-hand experience of air-raids during the Spanish Civil War identified as a mixture of anti-aircraft fire and bombs dropping. When the all-clear sounded, the War Office staff emerged from the basement and discovered to their surprise that there had been no air-raid, and that the ‘explosions’ had been caused by the noise of slamming office doors echoing down the lift shafts.2 In reality, the Luftwaffe was not yet capable of launching a ‘knock-out blow’. It was unable to begin the London Blitz until after the conquest of France and the Low Countries in the following year. The intervening eight months in the west were a period of ‘Phoney War’, sometimes almost as surreal as the first hours of the war in the War Office basement. On 5 September the Secretary of State for Air insisted that ‘there was no question of our bombing even the munitions factories at Essen, which were private property.’ Leaflets were dropped instead. Until Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940 no British bombs were dropped on German territory.3
The Defence of the Realm Page 33
