Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  When the question of nuclear intelligence had been discussed in 1943 it was agreed that the effort should be a joint one between the Americans and the British; and late in 1943 the first American officer, Major Furman, appeared in London. His experience in such matters was so much smaller than ours that after he had left, Welsh and one of the Tube Alloys’ officers shook hands with each other, in anticipation that we were so obviously going to be the senior partners in the exchange. But the picture gradually changed, especially when in the spring of 1944 Dr. Samuel Goudsmit appeared, and told us that he was Scientific Head of a mission code-named ‘ALSOS’, which had carte blanche from the President to investigate any captured equipment, papers, personnel or institutions that might throw light on nuclear developments in Germany. He did not seem aware of what we had done in Scientific Intelligence generally, and gave us the impression that he thought that we were even less experienced than he himself was. We considered whether we should form our own field team, such as the one that I was already operating for radar and similar German activities; but it was argued that it would be best for Anglo-American relations if, despite our greater experience, we should seek American permission to join the ALSOS mission under American leadership, and thus become very much the junior partner.

  The main target for ALSOS would, of course, be the Hechingen area where we knew Heisenberg and his colleagues to be. We had recently had an alarm, because as a routine precaution I had arranged for periodic photographic reconnaissance of the area to watch for any unusual activity, such as might indicate a nuclear installation. I had briefed Douglas Kendall at Medmenham, to look for such an installation, and for unusual supplies of electric power and water. In the third week of November 1944 reconnaissance showed that several sites of feverish activity had suddenly appeared near Hechingen. We could not at first make sense of them, but such activity in any event needed to be taken seriously, and the proximity to Hechingen made us wonder whether we had at last found evidence of a frantic effort by the Germans to make a last minute attempt at a nuclear bomb. I showed the photographs to Cherwell on 23rd November, who immediately warned Churchill; and plans were made both for further reconnaissance and for bombing. I began to feel that nuclear intelligence had really ‘taken off’.

  Within a few days, though, the scare was dispelled. Kendall had spotted that all the sites were in the same string of valleys, and were on much the same level. After a visit to the Geological Museum in South Kensington, he found that a German geologist had reported low-grade oil shales in the area, and it turned out that all that the Germans were doing, now that their oil installations were being heavily attacked, was to try to exploit this unpromising source of supply. This salutary observation by Kendall much more than made up for the episode of the ‘lemon squeezers’.

  Having put our head in the American jaws, we were anxious to have as strong a moral claim as possible when it came to sharing the prospective nuclear information from Germany. This point was stressed to me by Eric Welsh in the early months of 1945, and he suggested that since the general idea was to air-lift the ALSOS mission into Hechingen at the earliest possible moment, we could press our claim for an appropriate share if we supplied the actual air-lift. This we could easily do, because Rupert Cecil was on my staff and an operational wing commander; and I persuaded Norman Bottomley, the Deputy Chief of Air Staff, to let us have the necessary aircraft and crews. Cecil had originally wanted Ansons, because they could land in confined areas, but accepted Dakotas because they turned out to be at least as good in this respect and carried a larger load. It was therefore agreed that Cecil should go as air-lift commander and as my representative, along with ‘Bimbo’ Norman, who was temporarily, to our delight, commissioned as a wing commander, to act as our main German linguist.

  American forces approached Hechingen towards the end of April 1945, and the ALSOS mission moved in. Besides the German physicists and their experimental equipment, including a partly built nuclear pile, there were many documents. Anticipating that documents would be one of the most important finds I had asked Cecil and Norman to arrange that the documents should come back to London either for assessment by us, or at least for us to copy before they went on to America. Cecil signalled me saying that the Americans were being difficult, but that they had ultimately agreed to fly the documents back to America via London, where I could have them for 24 hours. This was clearly a token, and nearly empty, gesture because there were a great many papers, and it was perhaps thought that it would be so useless to us that we would decline the offer. Cecil asked me to signal to say whether I wished the documents to come. In the course of two or three hours, I arranged with the help of Leon Thompson, who had always been a very good friend to us, for every major copying service in the Ministries in London to take a share of the documents, and to work all night. I signalled Cecil, saying that we were accepting the offer; and the copying services stayed on duty.

  Instead of the documents I received another signal from Cecil and Norman saying that while they had been absent arranging the details of the return air-lift, the Americans had reversed their agreement to the documents coming to London—on the advice of Perrin and Welsh who had told them that my officers and I were not secure enough: this from the men who had asked me to arrange the air-lift, and whom I had originally brought together in the nuclear intelligence picture!

  So the documents were flown direct to America without copies being made in case of an accident to the aircraft, when neither we nor the Americans would have been able to examine them. In point of fact, they were not of very great interest, but this was not known at the time the decision was made. In The Virus House, David Irving has been led to postulate that there was an agreement between Sir John Anderson, who at the time headed the nuclear energy work in Britain, and General Groves that the documents should go direct to America. This theory is untenable: if there was such an agreement, why did the Americans in ALSOS agree to the documents coming to London even for 24 hours? And why did I not know about it? I was a member of the special Anglo-American Intelligence Committee which had been formed by Anderson and Groves themselves as recently as November 1944, the other members being Perrin and Welsh and Majors Furman and Calvert of the United States Army; would an agreement be made by Anderson without informing his own Committee? Would any responsible statesman, British or American, have agreed to a procedure in which the documents could have been lost over the Atlantic, without copies first being made? My belief is that there never was such an agreement, and that it has only been suggested to cover an entirely different explanation.

  The fact is that the documents went to America, and when copies ultimately came back to Britain they went to Perrin and Welsh, who thenceforward held the whip hand in all nuclear intelligence matters. The fact that they, rather than I, then became the authorities for nuclear intelligence is unimportant as regards the quality of the work for, so far as I know, they did it well. But it was disastrous to Scientific Intelligence generally, for reasons that will later appear.

  It was argued that we should do everything possible to keep in with the Americans, but I do not think that what happened was good for Anglo-American relations. Instead of relations being on an absolutely straight-dealing basis where individuals on either side stood up for the rights of their nation, those negotiating were tempted to seek temporary popularity by acquiescence, or otherwise, with negotiators on the other side, and so build up their positions in Britain by achieving reputations for ‘getting on with’ and ‘being trusted by’ the Americans. I would never do it: the Americans had rights and so did we, and I would expect an American officer to stand up for his country when he thought it was being outsmarted as I would do in my turn. I must have fought the Americans harder than most through this difficult period;1 and I was astonished subsequently to be awarded two of their medals, including their highest civilian award and, as far as I know, to be the only British scientist whom they decorated twice.

  The implication that my offic
ers and I were insecure would have been laughable had not the general motive been so serious. For the same argument was used to keep Henry Tizard out of the nuclear energy picture when he went back to the Ministry of Defence in 1948 as Chief Scientific Adviser, presumably because some of those who were in positions of power wished to lose nothing to him—and this at a time when Klaus Fuchs was passing secrets to the Russians, and when pandering to the Americans had been shattered by the passing of the McMahon Act, which had broken the partnership the panderers professed to be fostering.

  After Hechingen, we had the problem of what to do with the German nuclear physicists who had been rounded up, and who were temporarily held in an American internment camp in France known as ‘Dustbin’. After they had been there a short while, Welsh suggested to me that we should get them moved to Britain because he had heard that an American General had said the best way of dealing with the nuclear physics problem in post-war Germany was to shoot all their nuclear physicists. Could I therefore please intervene, and somehow have the physicists held in England? Welsh’s statements were sometimes made with a hidden motive, but the danger did seem possible, and we should at least have some residual advantage if the physicists came to Britain instead of going to America. I therefore suggested to Stewart Menzies that they might be accommodated in Farm Hall, the country house in Huntingdon which M.I.6 and S.O.E. had used as a staging-post for agents who were about to be flown into Occupied Territory from the R.A.F. Station at Tempsford, and which was now vacant. Menzies agreed, and I advised that before the physicists arrived we should have the house fitted out with microphones, so that we could hear their reactions when they realized how far the Americans and ourselves had progressed. If this was an ungentlemanly thing to do, it was a relatively small advantage to be taken of the possible fact that we had saved them from being shot. The move bewildered Sam Goudsmit who afterwards wrote in Alsos, ‘Just why these top German physicists were interned in England I never understood …’

  By far the most interesting items that came out of the Farm Hall conversations were the reactions of the German physicists when the news of the bomb on Hiroshima reached them on 7th August 1945. Incidentally, we ourselves were almost awestruck, not so much at the power of the bomb, for this we had expected, but because the Americans had used it with so little notice. It had been clear to us that at least some Japanese authorities knew that they were losing the war, and that they were putting out peace feelers. So much so, in fact, that in March 1945 Geoffrey Tandy, of the naval section at Bletchley, had remarked to me that it was even money whether Germany or Japan would collapse first. For myself, I would have given the Japanese the chance of witnessing a demonstration before actually dropping a bomb on them, not entirely out of feeling for the Japanese who, although I have since come to like them, had conducted the war in a way (for example at Pearl Harbor and in torturing prisoners) that put them beyond the pale of normal humanity. But it was clear that with the dropping of the bomb another threshold would have been crossed, although it can still be argued that many more lives were saved on both sides by the sudden end of the war that would otherwise have been lost in its prolongation.

  The transcripts of the reactions of the German physicists have never been published in full, because the official British attitude has been that they never existed. Transcripts were sent to America, of course, and they have been partly quoted both by Groves and Goudsmit. There is no dignity in denying their existence, which I myself have never tried to hide. Their historical importance lies in the light that they might throw on the question of the extent to which the German physicists had thought of making a bomb. Afterwards, Heisenberg gave the impression that he merely kept in with the Nazis because, as he explained to Robert Jungk in Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, ‘Under a dictatorship active resistance can only be practised by those who pretend to collaborate with the regime’. And if he strove to keep control of nuclear energy in Germany, Jungk says that this was because he and his friends feared that ‘other less scrupulous physicists might in different circumstances make the attempt to construct atom bombs for Hitler’.

  I would accept that there was something to the comment of von Weizsäcker, one of the physicists at Farm Hall, who said, ‘I believe that the reason why we did not do it was that all the physicists did not want to do it, on principle.… If we had wanted Germany to win the war we could have succeeded’. But against this must be set the comment of his colleague Baggc: ‘I think it is absurd for von Weizsäcker to say that he did not want the thing to succeed: that may be so in his case but not for all of us’. So the reactions at Farm Hall ranged from those of one or two who regarded themselves as defeated Generals, to others such as Otto Hahn, who was so upset that his original discovery of nuclear fission, had led to so much destruction of humanity that he had to be restrained from commiting suicide. All this is clear from what has been published about Farm Hall.1

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  A.D.I. (Science) Overseas

  THROUGHOUT THE war my primary job had been to remain in London directing the various collecting agencies, collating the information that they provided, and seeing that their achievements were used to best advantage. But it was vital from time to time for us to go into the field, partly to give advice on the spot to commanders, and still more to pick up information that might be missed by others without our specialist background. Thus Derek Garrard had gone out to Gibraltar in 1942 to investigate the German infra-red barrage, and subsequently to North Africa to examine German radar equipment.

  Our main overseas effort lay in Western Europe after D-Day. Hugh Smith was keen to get into the field again, and so I made him head of my overseas party, and the Air Force gave him the honorary rank of wing commander. Besides Arthen Jones, we had officers from Technical Intelligence attached to us, notably David Nutting, who was a physics graduate and a squadron leader. Another physicist, Maurice Stephenson joined us; he was a captain in R.E.M.E.; and we had two other R.E.M.E. officers, Majors K. G. Dobson and R. A. Fell. They were seconded to us by the Army particularly to look at Würzburgs and other items of German anti-aircraft radar, because this kind of equipment was an Army responsibility in Britain.

  Our first officers went over on D+2, and they were soon sending back a steady stream of information, documents, and equipment. On 18th July 1944, a whole 3-ton load of equipment came up to London, but arrived just too late for anyone to examine it, and so it was parked outside the Air Intelligence building in Monck Street. Besides radar equipment it included ‘something for the Boss’ which was the reason why it had been brought straight to Air Ministry rather than going to Farnborough. This was an infra-red detector of the type that the Germans were using for ship detection. When I reached my office in the morning, I found that during the night a flying bomb had scored an absolutely direct hit on our lorry, and all our booty had been destroyed. But it had its compensation in the bewilderment that pervaded the Technical Intelligence branch for the rest of the day. For when they examined the wreck they of course found many items of electronic gear, which they assumed to have been on the flying bomb, and so led themselves to think that the Germans had a new and very accurately controlled missile which could be directed so precisely as to score the closest of near misses on the Air Intelligence building.

  We had envisaged expeditions to some of the sites that we had studied from afar for so long, one proposal being that we should hold a celebration on the Hague Peninsula near Cherbourg, where several beam stations as well as our original Freya station at Auderville were located; but I myself went to France only once. This was to advise on countermeasures against the V-Is and V2-s, which were now being directed primarily against Antwerp, but my Air Force friends who had arranged it had also intended that there should be some fairly hectic entertainment. Unfortunately, they happened to pick 31st October for Paris, and 1st November for Brussels, overlooking the fact that these were All Souls Day and All Saints Day, and that everywhere was closed. They had even laid on an air
craft of the King’s Flight, complete with pilot with white gloves, but to no avail. And still worse was our reception when we returned home. We had just one hour available for shopping on the morning of 2nd November, when the shops were open again, and we wandered round a large departmental store, looking for inspiration. None of us knew what our wives’ measurements were, nor did we know their colours of lipstick or their favourite perfumes. At last, I was inspired. I saw a great tray of the kind of hairclips known as ‘kirbigrips’, about a shortage of which Vera had been complaining for the past two years. I said, ‘This is it, chaps! I know they’re short of kirbigrips, and this is the most welcome present that we can take back!’ And was I wrong! If our relations have never recovered from the bathwater in 1940, they have never been quite the same after that visit to Paris and Brussels.

  As more territory fell into Allied hands, the work of the overseas party widened. The enthusiasm of its members was such that they were sometimes ahead of our spearhead forces, and we accepted the surrender of at least one large German town. And Bimbo Norman, still looking the most unmilitary of men, even in his wing commander’s uniform, was horrified when he was asked by some German villagers to round up a party of ‘Werwolfs’, the diehard Nazi Resistance.

  There were, of course, other overseas parties besides ours. In fact, when the war ended there were a great many teams sent out from our Research Establishments under the aegis of the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, of which I was a member. Robert Watson-Watt headed a party to Eindhoven, dressed as a group captain. He did not feel that this rank reflected his true military equivalence, only to be told that the Prime Minister himself was content to be an air commodore, just one grade up, when he travelled in R.A.F. uniform. Watson-Watt arrived back in London very indignant, because the Philips scientists and engineers repeatedly told him when he asked them questions that they had already given the information to Appleton. He was furious that his rival should have received the information, but we could never tell him the true explanation. This was that one or two men from Philips had been coming across during the winter, making clandestine passages through the German lines. They were interviewed by officers in M.I.6, who asked me to suggest someone who could conduct technical conversations with them. I suggested Charles Frank, and they said that it would be better if the Dutchmen thought that he was someone already well known, and so they introduced him as ‘Appleton’. If the Dutchmen wanted an explanation, for example if one of them already knew Sir Edward Appleton by sight, the M.I.6 officers proposed to explain that Charles was Edward Appleton’s nephew. So the Dutchmen kept us informed of developments at Eindhoven, and we fed the information out through our normal channels. Somehow, we could only regard the unforeseen effect on Watson-Watt as an unexpected bonus.