Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  The demands on our services grew; we purchased at a very favourable exchange rate chemical balances for the Agricultural Research Council: we supplied German radar components, which were generally much better engineered than our own, to both Bernard Lovell and Martin Ryle, to help them in their start on radioastronomy: and we distributed to British universities electrical and other instruments recovered from the German Research Establishments. This kind of activity became so substantial that I decided to convert our Overseas Party into a new Unit, the Air Scientific Equipment Recovery Unit, with the specific object of bringing back equipment for distribution in Britain. I put Eric Ackermann in command, especially since he was anxious to stay on whilst others such as Hugh Smith, Ken Dobson, and Andrew Fell, were intending to get back to civil life reasonably shortly.

  Ackermann’s enthusiasm could sometimes present problems. At one stage he had collected so much equipment that he signalled me demanding three Dakotas to transport it back to Farnborough. I thought that it was somewhat out of order for my junior to expect me to arrange transport for him, and so I sent a signal back saying, ‘Arrange transport yourself’, omitting the ‘bloody well’ before ‘arrange’ that would have more correctly reflected my mind. To my surprise, three Dakotas shortly flew into Farnborough with the equipment. I had not reckoned with Ackermann’s resource: as soon as he received my signal he went to the Chief Transport Officer, showed him the signal, saying, ‘Look Sir, Dr. Jones authorizes me to arrange the transport’, and promptly got all that he wanted.

  He was, incidentally, backed with a marvellous document that Hugh Smith had drawn up, with all his professional skill in English, which was headed, ‘Subject: Orders’. Hugh had found that wherever one wanted to go in the American Zone such a piece of paper was essential because no American officer would act without written authority. It may have stemmed from having a written Constitution. At any rate, it did not matter very much who had written the orders, so long as they said something, and Hugh’s masterpiece requested local British and American Forces to furnish the bearer with ‘accommodation, permits, and such assistance as he may require’. It also authorized ‘travel by service or civilian aircraft, road or rail transport, as necessary’ and also ‘the carriage of classified documents and photographic and scientific equipment.’

  The arrival of the three Dakotas provoked an incident which had all Farnborough laughing. We were so fully stretched that the only officer that I could spare Ackermann at this stage was a recent recruit who had been a classical scholar at Oxford, and who before the war had gone into a Ministry of Labour office at, I think, Nottingham. He was ultimately in charge of sending out Calling-up notices for the Forces, until the day came when he had to sign his own notice. When Ackermann sent back the three Dakotas, he detailed our classical scholar as escort, saying, ‘Remember, I want this equipment kept on ice at Farnborough till I get there!’ What Ackermann was worried about was that some of my other officers might get at the booty before he himself had a chance, but Farnborough was astonished by our pilot officer classical scholar going round the establishment demanding a large consignment of ice so that he could place the equipment on it, since he imagined that Ackermann’s instructions referred to the damage to the equipment that would result if its temperature became too high.

  The most remarkable of all Ackermann’s efforts started one afternoon in the autumn of 1945, when he appeared in my office with Roy Piggott, Edward Appleton’s scientific assistant. They said that Appleton was interested in getting ionospheric research going again between Britain and Germany now that the war had stopped, and that there was an important German ionospheric research station, headed by Dr. Dieminger, that had fled to a location somewhere in Austria, and in the American Zone. Could our unit locate Dieminger’s whereabouts, and arrange to transport him and his staff and equipment back to Lindau, near Gottingen, assuming that Dieminger were willing? Piggott confirmed that Appleton would like this done, and since Appleton had been a good friend to us, and was head of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, I tentatively agreed, asking Ackermann if he thought that he could ‘work it in’ with the rest of his programme. Ackermann said that he could, and the two left my office. Had I known more about Piggott, I might not have been so misled by his quiet air, for this proved to hide unexpected resource. Shortly after the war, for example, he and his wife had problems with cutting their baby’s nails, because whenever they tried to do so, the baby screamed its head off. One night they heard a bump, and rushed into the baby’s room to find that it had climbed out of its cot and fallen on the floor, knocking itself unconscious. Before Piggott went for the doctor he said, ‘Here’s our chance,’ and cut the baby’s nails.

  Anyway, I had no idea of what I was in for. I heard almost nothing of either Ackermann or Piggott for about two months and then I began to hear rumours. A member of the Radio Security Service had called on Dr. R. L. Smith Rose, the Head of Radio Division at the National Physical Laboratory, and asked him whether he could throw any light on the activities of what was suspected to be a large black market gang operating in Germany and which used radio links. Most of the messages were in an unbreakable code, using frequencies allocated to the Royal Air Force but definitely not an R.A.F. code; there were a few words ‘in clear’, the three most interesting being ‘Smith Rose’, ‘cheese machine’ and fifty thousand Reichmarks’. Smith Rose was, of course, completely bewildered; the explanation was that the messages had indeed emanated from Ackermann, and that Smith Rose’s name had come up in connection with the ionospheric project. The ‘cheese machine’ was a diffraction grating ruling engine in Hamburg which Ackermann knew interested me, and he was trying to bring its builder to England for me to talk to. The ‘fifty thousand Reichmarks’ was part of the money that he needed for the general support of his unit.

  For the moment, I was merely amused by Smith Rose’s bewilderment; but I myself was bewildered a few days later when Margaret Masterman, my W.A.A.F. Flight Officer, marched in with a file, saying rather pertly, ‘I think that you should see this, Sir!’ It was a standard War Office file with a great St. Andrew’s Cross on it with the legend ‘Hand of officer only’. Then I saw its astonishing heading: ‘Obscene W/T Traffic’. I said to Margaret, ‘What the Hell is this to do with me?’ She replied, ‘I think you’d better read it, Sir!’ and fled. As I read, I realized that it was all part of the same story. There was this large gang, somewhere in southern Germany, and the radio bearings showed that it had been moving around, and the radio traffic was passed between the mobile part of the gang and its headquarters, which seemed to remain fixed. Most of the traffic had defied the cryptographers; unknown to them, this was because Ackermann had obtained Foreign Office ‘one time pads’ for encyphering his messages. The partial denouement had come when parties to celebrate the success of the expedition had occurred simultaneously both at the fixed headquarters and at the mobile unit, with a foreseeable result on their operators who, after a minor misunderstanding engaged in hurling ‘opprobrious epithets’ over the ether, scandalizing the Radio Security Service who thereupon redoubled their efforts to find who was responsible. When it was clear that R.A.F. frequencies were involved, these were traced to Ackermann, who had been missing for nearly two months.

  The file ended with a certificate saying, ‘I can personally certify that the traffic was obscene, because I listened to it myself,’ signed by a major on the General Staff. When I called Margaret Masterman in to ask if she had read it she said, ‘Yes Sir, but I don’t think it was too bad!’ And she had hardly left when of all people Ackermann himself appeared. He asked me whether I had been hearing things about him, and I pointed to the file. He said that that was only part of the story, and I had better hear the rest of it. The ‘little job’ that he was to do for Appleton turned out to be a prodigious undertaking. In the first place, it involved a journey of some hundreds of miles from north Germany down into the American Zone of Austria; and he had decided that they ought to have
enough fuel to cover the whole of the expedition to Austria and back to base. The total requirement came to eighty 3-ton lorries with, of course, their drivers and 20 thousand gallons of petrol. Somehow he had charmed all this out of the Chief Transport Officer of the British Air Force of occupation (B.A.F.O.) along with five armoured cars and a full posse of motorcycle outriders. They had set out for Austria in deep winter and, apart from the indecipherable signals, little more was heard of them.

  They found Dr. Dieminger very willing to return; and so, nearly two months after they set out, they were back in the British Zone and ready to set him up with his equipment at Lindau. But events now caught up with Ackermann, because at the Commander-in-Chief’s weekly conference, the C-in-C himself—Sholto Douglas—had wanted something done, when the Chief Transport Officer told him that he did not have the necessary reserve of transport because he had lent it all to Flight Lieutenant Ackermann, who had said that he had a job to do for Dr. Jones. The C-in-C being frustrated, he then proceeded to the next item on the agenda, which was the Chief Signals Officer’s report for the week. This included the matter of the obscene traffic, of which he had now been notified, and he had to report, once again, that the offending frequencies had been allocated to Flight Lieutenant Ackermann. So the latter was summoned to appear before the C-in-C.

  Ackermann very sensibly decided that it would be better if I heard the whole story from him first, and so he had flown over from Germany for the afternoon to tell me. He was due to appear before the C-in-C the following afternoon, but he hoped that his path was going to be eased by the Chief Intelligence Officer, for the C.I.O. had invited Ackermann to lunch in the Senior Staff Mess, where it was hoped he might meet the C-in-C socially over a drink before the formal carpeting started after lunch. The C.I.O. himself told me that he duly took Ackermann into the C-in-C’s office after lunch, and left him there, returning twenty minutes later, as he put it, ‘to pick up the bits’. To his astonishment he saw Ackermann smoking one of the C-in-C’s cigars, with the C-in-C listening attentively to Ackermann’s story of his exploits and why he had done them. The C-in-C seemed quite disappointed at the C.I.O. breaking in, and remarked that he ought to be getting on with other work but he added that, ‘This has been very interesting, Ackermann. I can quite see the importance of the work that you are doing, and if you don’t get enough help in future, you just come to me direct!’

  So Ackermann survived. He persuaded me to build him laboratories at Obernkirchen, not far from B.A.F.O. Headquarters at Buckeburg, where he spent several years. When I visited him in 1946, some of his captured German radio transmitters were the mainstay of the British Forces Network in Germany, which our Unit continued to transmit until a regular service could be set up. And the quality of Ackermann’s radio work in Germany was so well regarded by the Americans that it did more than anything else after the war to ensure the continued exchange of electronic intelligence between us.

  Another aspect of overseas operations that might ultimately have predominated was the war with Japan. So long as Germany was our main opponent my own duty was clear, for it was evident that the Germans were technically well ahead of the Japanese, and therefore that my kind of Intelligence would have much greater impact in the European Theatre. But we might be able to help the Allied Forces in the Pacific Theatre by letting them know what the Germans had made available to the Japanese in new military technology; and we could do something to estimate what developments the Japanese had made for themselves by what they told the Germans. The Japanese Attachés even sometimes had with them men who were specifically termed ‘Scientific Intelligence Officers’ to assist them in gathering information about their ally. We watched their activities with interest, and could say, for example, that the Germans had supplied early forms of Würzburg and Lichtenstein radars, listening receivers for submarines, and guided anti-shipping bombs, although we noted a reluctance to let the Japanese have the latest models. We also learnt details of Japanese developments in airborne radar as they revealed them to the Germans.

  We were thus able to throw a useful sidelight on Japan, and one of my officers was posted for a time to Lord Mountbatten’s Command in South East Asia. Had the Japanese war continued, we would have switched our main attention to it; but bearing in mind the crumbling state of Japan in early 1945 and the chance that the atomic bomb would be produced, I made no elaborate preparations.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The Year Of Madness

  THE WAR with Germany officially ended on 8th May 1945. Amid the generally convivial atmosphere in Richmond, I personally felt miserable. It was partly because such an absorbing phase of my life was coming to an end, but still more because I thought that I could see the mess that lay ahead of all of us, now that our main national objective had disappeared.

  In 1944, Ben Lockspeiser, now Director General of Scientific Research in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, had warned me there would be what he called, ‘A year of madness’ when the war ended, in which many ridiculous arrangements and plans would be made.

  The first intimation that my own work might be affected came from one of our best friends, Clifford Evans, the Cambridge botanist who was in the Radar Section of the Naval Intelligence Division. He told me that N.I.D. had been discussing among themselves about what ought to be done regarding the post-war organization of Scientific Intelligence. The Admiralty, it will be remembered, had hitherto played a Puckish part: when Scientific Intelligence could have been rationally organized on an inter-Service basis in 1939, the other two Services had agreed but the Director of Scientific Research of the Admiralty had refused. Then, as German radar and infra-red had developed, I had had to keep watch on behalf of the Navy, with the cordial agreement of N.I.D. Actually, the Admiralty, having seen what a difference Scientific Intelligence could make, had a year or so before appointed a scientist, Edward Gollin, to N.I.D. to cover aspects other than radar, but had never told us. The War Office had still no scientist in Military Intelligence, and as regards radar matters its Anti-Aircraft Section, headed by Gubby Allen, relied entirely on us.

  Well, it was fair enough that there should now be a joint discussion of the future. But what alarmed me was that N.I.D. had already gone to the Joint Intelligence Committee, and had suggested that this should form a special Committee to plan the future under an impartial and eminent Chairman, and had already named Professor P. M. S. Blackett.

  Blackett had been a hero of my undergraduate days. Fourteen years older than I was, he had gone into the Navy via Osborne, and had fought at Jutland as a Midshipman. He had then gone on to Cambridge, where he read physics, and worked with Rutherford; his mastery of experimental technique led him to discover the positive electron in 1932, for which he was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize. I had met him when he was one of the original members of the Tizard Committee, and I had seen him sometimes during the war, when he moved through a succession of posts in Anti-Aircraft Command, Farnborough, and Coastal Command, returning to the Admiralty as Director of Naval Operational Research. His contributions had been great, but I had seen him make mistakes. He tended to jump into a new field, thinking that his fresh ideas were better than those who had worked in the field for some time. Sometimes they were, but not always. He was given to ‘rational’ solutions of problems which sometimes completely overlooked the human aspects involved, and he would then press these solutions with a fervour that belied their apparent rationalism. He was a Fabian, and his approach was different from my own, if only because he would move from one post to another with relative ease, whereas I felt committed to whatever post I was in, to make as long-term a success of it as possible. I always hoped that if the world were collapsing, Blackett and I would find ourselves fighting side by side in the last ditch, but the routes by which we got there would have been very differrent.

  It was worrying enough to have Blackett as Chairman, but the composition of the Committee gave no comfort, either. Apart from Gollin, who at least had a year’s experience in Sci
entific Intelligence, and myself, no other member of the Committee had. Charles Ellis, the Scientific Adviser to the War Office, whose experts had made such a mess of the rocket Intelligence, was there; and since he and Blackett were both professors and Fellows of the Royal Society, my own opinions were completely outweighed—none of my wartime experience was considered relevant.

  I did my best with Blackett, letting him see my organization and its results, and I wrote a paper for the Committee putting forward my own ideas about the future. The organization of an Intelligence system presents difficult problems because, as my report stated:

  A fundamental difficulty of Intelligence work is that input is by source, and output is by subject. A changeover has thus to occur inside the Intelligence machine, which therefore has to, act as far as possible as a single perfect human mind, observing, remembering, criticizing and correlating different types of information, and then giving expression to the result. No card index can do it. although indexes are useful adjuncts. The larger the organization, the less can it resemble a single mind. An Intelligence organization has therefore to consist of as small a number as possible of individuals with abilities as great as possible. For the same reason, Intelligence is better done by a staff than by a committee.