Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  Another fundamental difficulty in Intelligence organization is that the collators have the more responsible task in that they must direct the collecting services, if only because the collators alone see the whole picture; if there are any criticisms from the external world, it is the collation section which has to face them. At the same time, the collectors often have the more difficult task, and their work is the more fundamental. This inequality between responsibility and fundamental importance can only be solved by making collection and collation responsible to a common Head.

  I then gave my own experience, indicating that our work was best done by working inside M.I.6, even in war. In peacetime this would be even more so, since the two main sources of Intelligence, our espionage system and our listening to radio transmissions, were both controlled by the Head of M.I.6, and the most important aspect of our work would be to influence these particular collecting services. All my own experience had shown the desirability of keeping the collecting and collating sides of the work as intimately together as possible, and it was this aspect that had given me such an advantage over all other branches of Intelligence, where they had been separate. My position had therefore been anomalous, through the historical accidents of 1939, but the anomaly had certainly been a profitable one.

  The potential weak point in my arrangement, which I fully recognized, was that the bringing of collection and collation together could result in a great ‘empire’ where Intelligence might become an end in itself, without sufficient regard for those whom it should serve—for example, the Operational Staffs. For myself, I avoided this danger by maintaining as close contacts with these Staffs as possible; and it was a problem which could always be solved provided that its importance was continually recognized. Faced, though, with the problem of having to choose to sit alongside these Staffs or alongside the collecting agencies, I would opt for the latter because the links on that side would be the more difficult to maintain with the necessary intimacy and informality from a distance.

  Blackett, though, would not listen. He told me that he realized the problem had been difficult, and that it had taken him two meetings of three hours to appreciate the problems fully and reach a solution; I told him that I had been in Intelligence for six years, rather than six hours, and that I could still not see a complete solution; I was sure that he did not appreciate the real difficulties, especially when human motives and interests were involved. His solution was to have each of the three Service Ministries with its own separate Scientific Intelligence and Technical Intelligence Section, and also to have separate Scientific and Technical Intelligence Sections inside M.I.6, and any other organizations that might become involved. This scheme bore some resemblance to the one that I had originally advanced in 1939, but the existence of so many separate sections without a single co-ordinating head (in my 1939 scheme, by contrast, it was clear that the three sections with the Services were to be subordinate to the central section) was obviously going to cause difficulties, especially when, as regards Scientific Intelligence, the Air Force one was so much larger and so much more experienced than those which the other Services would have to put up. And if I myself continued to head Air Scientific Intelligence, new personnel would have to be found for the Sections in M.I.6. But Blackett said that he would have no further discussion, and overruled my objections. I told the Committee that they had wrecked the future of Scientific Intelligence, but this produced no effect. I wish that I had been able to quote a passage in Macaulay which I have since encountered, as advice to would-be rationalizers. He described the objects of Whig legislation as, ‘To think much of convenience and little of symmetry’ and, ‘Never to remove an anomaly simply because it is an anomaly’. If Blackett had heeded these, Scientific Intelligence in post-war Britain would have been much stronger.

  Inevitably, the Joint Intelligence Committee, which itself consisted of senior officers with little experience in Intelligence, accepted Blackett’s recommendations. Not only were all three Services to have their separate Sections but, accepting my point about the indivisibility of Scientific Intelligence (for example a new weapon developed by the enemy for use by its Air Force might be intended for use against our Navy, and therefore two Services were directly involved), Blackett recommended that all the new Sections should be housed together in one building; and, for symmetry, this could not be one of the existing Service Ministries, so they were all to be housed together in derelict premises in Bryanston Square, far away from all three Services, and also from M.I.6. This resulted in the worst of all worlds in that the new organization would not have close connections with either the collecting agencies or with the operational staffs. Contact with M.I.6 was to be through the Joint Scientific and Technical Intelligence Committee, of which the total membership was to be thirteen, and to ensure perfect fairness and symmetry, the heads of the individual Scientific and Technical Intelligence Sections were to be Chairman in rotation, the chairmanship changing every three months among eight individuals or more. To add to the craziness of the scheme, Blackett overlooked the fact that Atomic Intelligence was not part of it. This was going to be done by Welsh and Perrin entirely independently of the main Scientific Intelligence organization, and it would have the foothold in M.I.6 that was denied to the rest of Scientific Intelligence.

  So having been in charge of Scientific Intelligence throughout the war, I now found myself consigned to be a single member of a committee of thirteen, only one of whom, Gollin, had any experience of Scientific Intelligence at all, and I was to take my turn as Chairman for three months every few years.

  When the new arrangements were promulgated, I called my staff together and told them what had happened. I had always said that, having had all the fun during the war, I had been prepared to go on through the dull days of peace to act as anchor-man to keep the nucleus of an organization available, which could be expanded again when trouble threatened. But that it was now going to be very difficult for me to go on, and I could certainly see no future for them in staying. Some, such as Edward Wright and Hugh Smith, were already going back to their pre-war university posts, and I offered the others all possible help in finding positions.

  The most indignant of all was our very loyal friend Yves Rocard. He was now back in France, having moved from the Sorbonne to the École Normale Superieure, but he still visited us from time to time, and he felt so strongly about what had happened to us that he wrote a pamphlet on ‘Co-ordination’; part of its preface ran:

  ‘… De fait, le petit service anglais qui a, on peut dire, gagné la guerre en contrant la technique allemande, se trouve bouleversé; I’homme qui était seul, formé par une dure expérience de six ans, est maintenant noyé parmi treize, tous neufs et déraisonnables. Loin d’être le chef et de pouvoir les former, il n’est qu’un des treize et peut à peine parler. Excédé, il part, les treize tombent à douze, le rendement de 1/1 tombe à 0/12. Pourquoi? Parce que lessuccès mêmede la Recherche, la bombe atomique, les armes nouvelles, ont fait venir une nouvelle couche de personnes, qui sentent le pouvoir politique que comportent tous ces éléments, et qui les veulent. Pour les avoir, il faut les pénétrer. Comment les pénétrer? Par la Coordination.…’

  ‘Indeed, the little British service which has, one can say, won the war by countering German techniques, has found itself in trouble; the man who was alone, matured by six years of harsh experiences, is now “drowning” among thirteen others, all new and naive. Far from being the chief and able to lead them, he is only one among thirteen, and can scarcely speak. Worn out, he leaves, the thirteen fall to twelve, the ratio of 1/1 falls to 0/12. Why? Because the very successes of Research, the atom bomb, the new weapons, have raised a new breed of people who sense the political power which all these elements allow to exist, and they want these elements. In order to have them, one must penetrate them. How can they be penetrated? By Coordination.’

  How had this disaster happened? Unfortunately Blackett’s enquiry had been conducted inside a frame of reference in w
hich I had to fight entirely on my own; there was now nobody like Medhurst inside Intelligence who would have appreciated what we had done, except perhaps for Stewart Menzies, who had disliked what Blackett had forced through. Menzies, discussing the disruption with me, said that we had worked together through the war, and he would be glad to continue. He knew that he could work with me, but he was damned if he was going to try working with three different scientists. Since my wartime job was to be split right in half—the M.I.6 side and the Air Staff side, he hoped that I would stay with him; but the split would be an unhappy one, and probably unworkable, since whoever took over the other side would have had no experience, and I would for a long time know his job better than he did.

  As for seeking support outside Intelligence, I had of course Cherwell and Portal: but the tide was running fast against individualism and in favour of egalitarianism: it was running against the Government, and everything was so much upset by the 1945 Election that nobody in high office could be expected to spend much time thinking about my problems. And unless they could have spent the time, they might merely conclude that I was trying to preserve my position for purely personal reasons. The explosion of the atomic bomb and the dropping of the Iron Curtain meant that our military stance had to be thought out afresh; and although a fundamental look at Intelligence should have been part of this thinking, many in senior posts were exhausted by the strains of the war.

  The strain had told on Churchill, too, and it showed in his Election speeches, in which he conjured up a frightening picture of what Britain would be like under Socialism. Actually, his speeches do not sound so shrill now as they did at the time; but he was addressing a nation out of temper: for although the Allies had won the war with Germany, Britain—while bearing the brunt—had had to submit to America; and the submission was patent to the common man by such measures as the replacement of British markings by American on British tanks before D-Day. One general even said to me, ‘What else could you expect from a man with an American mother?’ I was alarmed by the tone of Churchill’s first speech, and immediately went to Cherwell and asked him to advise Churchill to take a different line because he was misjudging the temper of the nation. I added, ‘If he goes on in this way, the P.M. will lose the Election’. Cherwell said that he agreed with me, but that he was unable to do anything because Churchill had taken advice about his line of attack from Brendan Bracken and Duncan Sandys; but I note that Lord Moran has said that it was Bracken and Beaverbrook who were the men who had advised Churchill in this instance.

  Anyway, the Conservatives lost the Election, and Churchill resigned on 27th July 1945. He felt the shock deeply—it was a sharper change of fortune than any man might expect to face. But no political misfortune could detract from the universal admiration for what he had done in the war. And so, after a moment of uncertainty in which he contemplated graceful retirement ‘in an odour of civic freedom’ his confidence returned. ‘Many people,’ he said to me eighteen months later, ‘say that I ought to have retired after the war, and have become some sort of elder statesman. But how could I? I have fought all my life and I cannot give up fighting now!’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  German Generals And Staff Colleges

  IN THE chaos of 1945, I did what I could to round off my wartime work, and to salvage whatever remnants of organization might be valuable in the future. One of my more congenial tasks was to interrogate some of the German generals who had been my main opponents. They were now interned in a prisoner-of-war camp near Beaconsfield, and I went there to meet them. The headquarters was a large Georgian country house, Wilton Park, and as we approached it I saw an extraordinary sight. Fifty or more German generals were taking their exercise inside a barbed wire compound in the plan of an equilateral triangle of perhaps 80 yards side. Several were already famous names with us, including Field Marshals von Rundstedt and Milch, and I felt rather as one does in a restaurant on going up to a tank of swimming trout and pointing a finger saying, ‘I’ll have that one!’

  Of the generals, Wolfgang Martini, General der Luftnachrichtentruppe, was the man I wanted to talk to most, because he had been in charge of all Luftwaffe signals and radar right through the war and indeed, as he told me, continuously from 1933. I wondered how I was going to interrogate a general, but I found it very easy because he also wanted to interrogate me. He had a very long memory, and could remember various incidents which had puzzled him. He immediately wanted to know, for example, why his jamming of Malta had failed in 1942, and he was ruefully amused by my explanation.

  Another incident which he said had troubled him had occurred in the autumn of 1944, when he had brought into use a very powerful new jammer for our ‘Gee’ system and had sited it in the television tower on the Feldberg near Frankfurt. Within a few days we had sent out some fighter bombers and knocked the tower down—how had we done it? I could not tell him the complete explanation at the time, although I was able to do so later. It was due to the resource of a young R.A.F. Signals Officer who had been at one of our stand-by ‘Gee’ stations that was not actually transmitting. He locked his receiver on to the German pulses, and telephoned a colleague at another stand-by station to do the same. When the German pulses were coming in at the same instant as the genuine ‘Gee’ pulses at the other receiver, they were coming in somewhat earlier or later than the genuine pulses at his receiver. By measuring the time interval between the pulses at his receiver, he could then locate the jammer somewhere on one of the family of hyperbolae with the two stand-by ‘Gee’ stations as foci. The information was passed back to Charles Frank and me, and tracing the course of the particular hyperbola we saw that it passed near the Feldberg, which we knew was the site of the sister tower to the one on the Brocken (p. 50) that Charles had investigated in 1938. So we advised the Air Force to go out and destroy it. The jamming ceased immediately—and Martini told me that he had been so puzzled by our prompt action that he ordered a Court of Inquiry regarding the possible breach of security. We admired the resource of the young Signals Officer, but we did not know who he was. After the war, Charles Frank went to work in the Physics Laboratory at Bristol, where a new research student was just starting, having come out of the Air Force. He turned out to be the officer involved—Peter Fowler, son of Sir Ralph Fowler and grandson of Rutherford, and later to be Professor of Physics at Bristol.

  I spent two or three days with Martini, talking over the war, and he was allowed the privilege of walking unescorted with me and our interpreter in the grounds. He tried to warn me about the threat from Russia, but I had to tell him that the Russians were our allies, and that it would be improper to pursue such a discussion. He himself was particularly worried about the welfare of his sister, who lived in Poznan. Towards the end of our conversations, he enquired whether he might ask my name. I told him, of course, but both the interpreter and I could see that he was not convinced. He was clearly acquainted with English surnames enough to know that Jones was one of the commonest, and he obviously concluded that it was a nom-de-guerre; but he could not very well express his disbelief. I was therefore delighted, after Volume II of Churchill’s memoirs came out in 1950, to receive a letter which Martini had sent to Churchill, with the request that it should be forwarded to me. Part of this latter ran:

  I have just read the description of the Battle of Britain in the summer and autumn of 1940 in the recently published translation of the Second Volume of Churchill’s Memoirs. In this way I also read the appreciation of Dr. R. V. Jones’s great services, in the form of suggestions and directions for the fight against German radio navigation techniques, for the British air defence and therefore for Britain. I remember a British civilian gentleman, from my time at a prisoner-of-war in a camp near Beaconsfield from the end of May until the beginning of August 1945, who visited me repeatedly, and with whom I had several discussions about the English-German radio war, which were conducted in a chivalrous manner. This gentleman was introduced to me under the name of ‘Jones’ by the En
glish interpreter, and was referred to as a scientific adviser of the British headquarters for radio matters. I think it is therefore probable that Dr. R. V. Jones of the Memoirs is the same as my visitor.

  I of course replied, and in his second letter he added:

  I would not like to omit to mention, while acknowledging the receipt of your letter, that your visits, dear Professor, and the intellectual conversations that we had, were each time a ray of light in what for an old soldier were extremely hard and troubled times. It is unlikely that I shall visit England in the foreseeable future. It would therefore give me all the more pleasure to receive a visit from you when you are next in Germany.

  I talked also with General Josef Kammhuber, who had commanded the German nightfighters up to the time when we used Window. He had hardly expected to meet a civilian in my capacity, or to find the readiness with which I could from memory sketch the deployment of his main belt of nightfighter control stations; I told him that we had called it ‘The Kammhuber Line’. He smiled gratefully, for nobody in Germany had thought of the title; I hope that it compensated a little for the inconvenience of imprisonment. I told him how much I had admired the accuracy of his claims, and he modestly said that it was much easier for him than for us to get claims accurate, because his Line was so far back from the coast that the chances were that any bomber they shot down would crash somewhere on land, and he would allow no claim unless a piece of the aircraft was recovered. Eleven years later, when I was in Paris visiting the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE), the most senior officer present came up, shook my hand, and greeted me as an old friend. It was Kammhuber, who was just about to be German Chief of Air Staff.