Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  The result of the assessment, when it appeared some months later, seemed to show that it had no effect one way or the other. But Bomber Command argued that it was a good thing to let the pilots go on using I.F.F. because it would encourage them to press home attacks over defended areas when they might otherwise be inclined to turn tail if caught by searchlights. This was a thoroughly immoral argument which sooner or later must lead to trouble.

  About a fortnight after the Bomber Command conference I was telephoned by a very respectful Flight Lieutenant Smith, who said that he would like to speak to me urgently on a matter of some personal importance, and suggested that I should join him for lunch at his Club, the Thatched House, just across the other side of St. James’s Park. Over a very pleasant lunch (he was also a member of the Athenaeum, where he said he went for high thinking and plain living, but came to the Thatched House when he wanted the reverse) he told me what his problem was. He was Reader in Anglo-Saxon in University College, London, but had joined the Royal Air Force and was currently a Flight Lieutenant in one of the personnel branches. Partly because of a motorcycle accident and partly a duodenal ulcer, he was on the point of being invalided out of the Air Force and he wanted to stay in. He had therefore looked through the various branches of the Air Staff to see whom he might persuade to take him on, and he thought that I might have a use for him.

  The use that he proposed was in examining charred documents from German aircraft, his qualification being that he was used to deciphering old and fragmentary documents. In particular, he had resolved a major puzzle presented by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He himself had started as a clerk on the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway before going to Leeds University and reading English. By inclination he was an engineer and he had marvellous hands. He had managed to use them, even in English studies, where he solved some problems in early typography by constructing a replica of an early printing press, one by Moxon, which showed what the early printers were up against, and therefore why they developed some of their techniques.

  He had also turned to photography, and had developed ways of detecting forgeries by the way different inks showed up in infra-red and ultra-violet photography. It was this capability that had led him to solve the problem of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, because a number of puzzling entries all turned out to be written in the same ink, which was different from that of the rest. What appeared to have happened was that some monk in Canterbury in the eleventh or twelfth century had ‘got at’ a copy of the Chronicle and inserted various items of false history, usually to the effect that someone had died, and had left his lands to the See of Canterbury; and part of the present wealth of Canterbury had been gained in this way.

  So Hugh Smith, as his name was, thought that he might be useful to me. Frankly I could not see that we would have many problems in this particular direction, but he was such a good and entertaining chap that I thought that if possible I would try to make a place on my staff for him. I therefore accepted his invitation to take Vera and our daughter, Susan, then eight months old, to his country cottage, a farmhouse at Alstone in Gloucestershire for the weekend.

  Fig. 9. Drawing of a Freya radar by Hugh Smith, based mainly on air reconnaissance photographs

  It was a thoroughly enjoyable break, and the first of many. There was usually an evening visit to ‘The Hobnails’ which was Hugh Smith’s ‘local’ and which—characteristically—he had managed to prove antedated (1474) the first mention of hobnails in the Oxford English Dictionary (1594). Its landlord, Phil Fletcher, belonged to a family that had run the Inn continuously since Lady Day 1743, and its patrons were basically Gloucestershire farmers, starting with ‘Sheddey’, ‘Matey’ and ‘Artey’ Chandler, three of seven brothers who had all been in the Gloucesters in the First War, and if there were five Sundays in a month, the fifth was ‘Pewter Sunday’ when all beer was served in tankards.

  On my return to London, I consulted Bimbo Norman who before going to Kings College had been at University College, and who knew Hugh Smith well. He was full of enthusiasm for the prospective appointment, and so I persuaded Charles Medhurst to allow me to recruit Hugh Smith, despite the fact that he had no scientific qualifications. It was a singularly happy appointment because Hugh had a tremendous personality, and was outstandingly good in smoothing our way over all kinds of administrative difficulties. He was also a first class draughtsman, and he took over the drawing of the diagrams for my various reports, using his own ingenious method of making perspective views of objects such as radar stations. An example of his craftsmanship in this direction is the drawing of a Freya shown in Figure 9. More of his attributes were to appear as the war proceeded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Jay’

  DECEPTION HAS been an important stratagem in war at least since Gideon scared the hosts of Midian into a disastrous stampede and Thomas Hobbes valued it so highly as to write in Leviathian ‘Force and fraud in war are the two cardinal virtues’. The schoolboys of my generation had a hero in Richard Meinertzhagen who, by feigning being shot and dropping a briefcase, misled the Turks into thinking that Allenby’s attack in Palestine in 1917 was coming on the wrong flank; and many will know from J. C. Masterman’s book The Double Cross System the story of our using captured German spies in World War II to provide misleading information to their headquarters.

  We of course had no monopoly of this art, and one of its greatest masters was a German officer, Colonel H. J. Giskes, who so brilliantly turned ‘Operation North Pole’ against us. This was an operation in which the Special Operations Executive parachuted sabotage agents into Holland, and Giskes succeeded in catching one of the first to be dropped. By getting this first agent to send suitable messages back to London, Giskes ensured that he knew where all subsequent agents were to be dropped, and so captured them all, at the same time getting enough signals back to London to make S.O.E. think that the agents were at large and operating a successful campaign.

  Why I admired Giskes, as it were ‘across the havoc of war’, was that in the middle of this very serious deception he counterfeited a signal asking S.O.E. to drop a load of tennis balls instead of explosives, on the pretext that the agent was in touch with the King of the Belgians, who was known to be keen on tennis, and who was more likely to be friendly if we could replenish his diminishing stock of tennis balls. Actually, had Colonel Giskes known more of English history he might have realized that tennis balls were a dangerous international commodity: a previous consignment had led to Agincourt.

  We ourselves had faced much the same problem as Giskes had, but of course in reverse. I can remember that during the early part of 1941 we knew from the Enigma traffic that a German agent was to be dropped by parachute somewhere in England, but we did not know where. We even knew the night of the operation, and we went home wondering what the chances were of catching him. When we enquired the following morning, we found that he was already in custody, in hospital in fact. He had been dropped with a radio set so that he could keep in contact with his base, and this had been suspended with him on the same parachute but, fortunately for us, between him and the parachute. As he landed, the radio set hit him on the head and knocked him out, and he was discovered unconscious by the police in, I believe, a ditch somewhere in Northamptonshire. I have sometimes used this incident as an illustration of the value of following the precept of Horace Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and founder of the Cambridge Instrument Company. He used to make the point in instrument design that whenever you think that you have made a good design, try reversing the arrangement of some of the parts—it might then work better. And had the Germans reversed the position of parachutist and radio set, the latter might have been demolished, but the agent would have been at large for much longer.

  My own contact with our deception work started through my first assistant, Harold Blyth, going to work with Kim Philby, who was in that part of M.I.6 which liaised with M.I.5 on matters of internal security. Harold told me that he would like me to meet one of
the M.I. officers concerned, whom I will call ‘George’. Although I did not know this until after the war, George was the key man in ‘The Man Who Never Was’, the deception in which a body dressed up as a Major in the Royal Marines was put into the sea off southern Spain with a dispatch case containing documents which made it appear that we were going to land in Sardinia and Greece in July 1943 when in fact we were going to invade Sicily. The deception was so successful that the Germans diverted an armoured division to Greece, and did not realize until much too late that our landing in Sicily was a major operation.

  Incidentally, I came to learn the truth about ‘The Man Who Never Was’ only in 1952, when Churchill asked me to come back to the Ministry of Defence for a year as Director of Scientific Intelligence. I was now a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and at my first meeting I heard a discussion about what should be done because Ian Colvin, later Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph and one of the men who kept Churchill informed on Germany in pre-war days, had worked out the facts of the operation, and had written a book which he had submitted for security clearance. Colvin told me that he had come to write his book because of Duff Cooper’s Operation Heartbreak, ostensibly a work of fiction but in which a deception operation was described so vividly that Colvin thought that it must have a basis in fact. The key point was the planting of a body of an army officer in the sea off Spain, with false documents calculated to mislead the Germans. Colvin therefore worked his way round the cemeteries on the coast of Spain until he found the actual grave, and one way or another he established most of the truth. Duff Cooper, then Ambassador in Paris, was approached by the security authorities and, as I heard it from George, said that if they attempted to prosecute him for a breach of security he would state that he had the story from Churchill himself, without any warning that security was still involved. The Joint Intelligence Committee decided, very unsportingly, I thought, to hold back Colvin’s account while they invited Ewen Montague, who had been in Naval Intelligence and was involved in the deception, to write an officially approved account which came out as The Man Who Never Was in 1953.

  My opportunity for working on the grand scale with George came in August 1941 when I was urgently summoned by Tizard one morning to discuss an unexpected operational emergency that had arisen. The background for this emergency was that a new radio navigational aid had been developed, particularly by R. J. Dippy at the Telecommunications Research Establishment, which was very much along the lines that I had proposed to the Air Ministry in 1938, and which had been turned down, partly because it was believed that the range of radio devices would not be great enough to permit accurate navigation over Germany, and partly because Bomber Command and others were convinced that these radio aids were not needed, anyway. The inaccuracies in our bombing revealed by the Butt Report had now come to light, and the Command was prepared to consider radio devices despite the fact that various senior officers had hitherto termed them ‘adventitious aids’.

  The system developed by Dippy was known as ‘Gee’ and it involved sending synchronized pulses from three stations in Britain. From the differences in the times of arrival of the three pulses at the aircraft, the navigator could determine his position. Trials of the system had been made over Britain and out into the Atlantic, and it worked very well. Bomber Command, however, still had misgivings, and would only be convinced if it could be tried out over Germany. The Command therefore fitted trial receivers into three aircraft and proceeded, without telling the Air Staff, to fly them over Germany, and the crews concerned were enthusiastic about the accuracy with which they were now able to find their way. Someone at Bomber Command then decided to use these three aircraft as primitive pathfinders for the rest of the bomber force, again without telling the Air Staff. Of course, it was only a matter of time before one of the aircraft was lost, and this in fact happened on 13th August 1941, when an aircraft of No. 115 Squadron was missing after leading a raid on Hanover. Bomber Command had thus repeated the error of the Germans in 1940, and this was an even more serious example, for wreckage of the aircraft could provide the Germans with information about the new system that was coming into use, but which in fact would not be available (apart from the three prototype receivers) until March 1942, some seven months ahead. At Portal’s request, Tizard had therefore called a meeting to discuss what should now be done.

  After the facts had been presented to the meeting, and it was made clear that for most of 1942 Bomber Command was either going to be committed to Gee or to continue to use its existing methods which had proved so inaccurate, Tizard asked me to assess how much the Germans might have discovered. We guessed that there was roughly a one in three chance that they had captured the receiver, although this was probably damaged because it had been fitted with demolition charges. Knowing the weakness of our own radio interception efforts, I thought that it was unlikely that the Germans would have so far recognized the pulse transmissions from the ground stations in England as being associated with a navigational system, and also that it was unlikely that they would have received reports from spies, especially since I knew that most of these were already locked up.

  Where the main danger lay was in the fact that 78 aircrew had been lost in the interval between the first Gee receiver being installed in a bomber at Marham (which was the base from which 115 Squadron operated) and the receiver being lost, and probably twenty or thirty of them would now be prisoners-of-war. From our experience over the beams and other matters, I reckoned that with as few as six prisoners from the Luftwaffe who knew about a particular development we should very probably have acquired some clue, either by interrogation or by eavesdropping on their conversations, of what was afoot. In general, air crew were more lively and interested in new devices than their counterparts in the other two Services, and as soon as some new device came into use at a particular station, everyone wanted to know what it did and how it worked. So if the Germans had twenty prisoners, it was quite likely that they might have overheard some reference to Gee, and this would have alerted them to investigating particularly the wreckage of any aircraft from the squadron involved.

  Since it was a matter of either Gee or nothing for most of 1942, Tizard asked me whether I thought that I could possibly mislead the Germans and throw them off the track until Gee should come into large-scale use, in seven months’ time. I replied that it was a long shot, but I would be glad to try. I immediately drew up a plan of campaign, which was endorsed by the meeting. It was, of course, a marvellous opportunity and the culmination of all my pre-war efforts in practical joking, with virtually as much of the national resources at my disposal as I wished. The issue at stake, the success of our bombing campaign, was so great that I could have anything I wanted within reason.

  My plan involved two aspects: the masking of any clues that the Germans might have already gathered or would gather in the future regarding the true nature of Gee, and second the planting of other clues to make them think that we were adopting an entirely different technique, since we could not avoid providing clues that some kind of new equipment was going to be installed in our bombers. The first step was to get the word ‘Gee’ abolished. The next was to get the type number changed from one in the ‘R3000’ series, which indicated its true nature as a receiver of pulse-type transmissions, which the Germans could have known from the airborne radar equipment that they had already captured (I.F.F. and A.S.V.). The new type number should be one in the ordinary communications series, and ‘TRI335’ was chosen, since this would suggest a new transmitter/receiver system for radio telegraphy or telephony. This solved two problems: I was told that for some months before Gee was installed on a large scale all aircraft coming off the production line would have to be fitted with the necessary hooks and so forth to accept the Gee receiver, and it was necessary that these fittings should be labelled from the start. The Germans would therefore have a long warning that something new was coming along, and an R3000 number would have given them a fatal clue. As it was, by ch
anging the type number to one that was thoroughly misleading, we turned an awkward situation to our advantage. Finally, the Gee transmitting stations in England were camouflaged to look like ordinary radar stations by providing them with extra masts and by removing the exact synchronization of their pulses which might otherwise have given a clue had the German interception service been alert enough to spot it.

  The next step was to provide something on which the Germans could focus their attention. Since it was likely that they would get wind that we were introducing some new radio navigational system, what better than to flatter them into thinking that we were going to copy them and use beams? I found that we had in fact already made some beam transmitters to give our bombers a line when they were attacking the German naval units in Brest, and so these beams were commandeered and re-erected on the east coast of England; I gave them the title of ‘Jay beams’. The new bombing system was to be called ‘Jay’ and I hoped that if the Germans had previously overheard British prisoners-of-war talking about Gee they would be misled into thinking that they had misheard the prisoners, who had really been speaking about Jay. And to give the Jay beams a further touch of authenticity, bomber crews were to be actually encouraged to use them as a directional aid when returning to bases in England, and possibly on the way out, too.

  A further channel of communication was open to me, and this was the possibility of providing false information via George and the German agents in Britain who were under his control. I therefore suggested that one of these agents should purport to have overheard a conversation on the evening of New Year’s day 1942 between two R.A.F. officers chatting in the Savoy. One who was rather ‘browned off’ said: ‘Why did Sir Frank Smith get his G.C.B.? All he has done is to copy the German beams—and a year late at that! In any case, it wasn’t him alone, but the chaps under him.’ ‘But,’ said his companion, ‘you must admit that at any rate we now have the Jay beams to get us to our targets; they worked okay on Brest, and we shall soon have them over Germany.’ In the ensuing argument the second officer demonstrated the Jay system by having the salt cellar as one beam station and the pepper pot as the other and impressing the lines of the beams on the tablecloth with the end of a fork.