Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  21b and c. The R.A.F. Reconnaissance photographs of Zempin and Peenemünde from Sortie N/1980 of 28 November, 1943, which proved that the ‘Ski Sites’ were to launch V-1s. 21b: Trial launching site at Zempin, showing similar buildings (R and M) to those ski sites, and a launching catapult. 21c: Launching catapult at Peenemünde with a V-1 ready for firing (and spotted by Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith).

  22a. Dr. Howard P. Robertson, Chief American Liaison with British Scientific Intelligence (courtesy of California Institute of Technology).

  22b. Professor Yves Rocard, Chief French Liaison with British Scientific Intelligence (courtesy of Yves Rocard).

  22c. Lieutenant Thomas Sneum, who flew to England from Denmark with a film of a Freya station (courtesy of Thomas Sneum).

  22d. Jerzy Chmielewski who collected parts from crashed V-2 rockets in Poland and brought them to Britain (courtesy of Dr. Jozef Garlinski).

  23. German radar on the Invasion coast before D-Day 1944, and ‘spoofing’ diversions.

  24. Flak Regiment 155(W)’s battle map showing (dark spots) fall of V-1s on London as reported by German ‘agents’ and (white spots) fall of V-1s as indicated by radio transmitters mounted in sample missiles.

  25a. German photograph of a V-1 track across the Straits of Dover taken by a camera with its shutter left open at night. The continuous white track is traced out by the flame of the bomb as it travels towards Kent, and the white spots (whose pattern puzzled the Germans) are bursts of anti-aircraft shells fitted with proximity fuses.

  25b. Drawing of a V-1 (FZG76) after R. Castle.

  25c. ‘Kamikaze’ V-1 fitted with a cockpit (courtesy of the Imperial War Museum).

  26. Aerial photograph of V-2 test site at Blizna, Poland, on which (black circles) a rocket and its firing platform were first identified (Sortie No. PRU385 of 5 May, 1944). This photograph gives some idea of the difficulty of interpreting photographs even of the best wartime quality (R.A.F. photograph).

  27a. Aerial photographs showing (at top) the same road pattern traced on the foreshore at Peenemünde, February, 1944, as was later recognized on the ground in Normandy (See Figure 29).

  27b. Photograph from the Peenemünde archives of a model made for Hitler in 1943, showing three rockets ready for firing from the same layout.

  28a. A4 rockets set up for firing on the foreshore at Peenemünde (courtesy of David Irving).

  28b. A4 rocket launched from inside the elliptical earthwork at Peenemünde beside the testing tower visible on Plate 19 (courtesy of Deutsches Museum, Munich).

  28c. Wooden ‘mock-up’ of an A4 rocket on its transporter (Meillerwagen) for training purposes, inside the elliptical earthwork, February, 1942. Note the ‘Lemon Squeezer’ blast deflector at the rear of the rocket (courtesy Deutsches Museum, Munich).

  29a. Jagdschloss plan-position-indicating radar near Ringsted in Denmark, photographed by Wing Commander D. W. Steventon, D.S.O., D.F.C., 24 September, 1944. Note the improvement in definition due to the use of a forward-facing camera (R.A.F. photograph).

  29b and c. Photographs taken ten minutes apart of a Jagdschloss, cathode-ray screen during a British Mosquito raid which was protected by jamming, and by clouds of Window sown during approach to the target and on the homeward journey. Distance between plotting centre and target about fifty miles.

  30a. Dismantling the German experimental nuclear pile at Haigerloch, 50 km. S.W. of Stuttgart, April, 1945. Rupert Cecil nearest camera, ‘Bimbo’ Norman extreme right, Eric Welsh standing on outer rim, the second man behind Cecil.

  30b. Examining captured nuclear files at Stadtilm, 20 km. S. of Erfurt. Cecil extreme right, Welsh nearest to Cecil, and Goudsmit extreme left (both photographs courtesy of David Irving).

  31. Buckingham Palace, 1946, with Vera, Susan and Robert.

  32. The Vicomtesse de Clarens at the Yorkshire Television Studios, December, 1976 (Yorkshire Television).

  Epilogue

  A LECTURE TO the Royal United Services Institution on 19th February 1947 gave me the chance to survey what had happened in World War II, and to summarize my philosophy for the benefit of anyone in charge of Scientific Intelligence in a future war:

  It is, first of all, to remember that the truest criterion of a good Intelligence organization is its ability to plan, to carry out and to exploit Intelligence attacks. You must frame the organization to do these things with the utmost efficiency; do not be hidebound by any pre-conceived fetishes of organization in securing the objective. You must remember that Intelligence depends more than anything else on individual minds and on individual courage, and your organization should only provide a smooth background on which these can operate. You must employ as few links as possible between the source and the operational staff who make use of the information. You must never forget to stand by your sources: they will repay you. Do as much of the actual Intelligence work yourself as you can; you will find that you can then speak with increased confidence at the highest conferences, which you will certainly be required to do. The fact that you have done much of the work yourself will give you a great advantage. Remember, as the cardinal principle of Intelligence, Occam’s Razor, ‘hypotheses must not be multiplied unnecessarily.’ Lastly, to anyone on whom my mantle may fall, I would say: remember Kipling’s

  ‘If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.…’

  In a time of crisis you will find that a tendency to lose one’s head is apt to appear at any level in administration. You will find yourself confronted with many frightening bogies conjured up by the agile imaginations of men often at higher levels than yourself. You will be unable to lay all these bogies at once, because to prove a negative case is one of the most difficult of Intelligence exercises. But you must find the simplest, commonsense hypothesis and stick to it until a fresh fact proves you wrong, however eminent an authority is attached to another view. You will find yourself blamed on the one hand for not telling everybody every conclusion you come to, even before you have thought of it, and on the other for indiscretion by the Security authorities. You will be accused of hoarding information, even though this is often a legitimate thing to do. And you will learn that in the Intelligence work there is an enormous premium placed upon going off at half-cock. The World seems to prefer a busy show of promptness to quiet, mature action, however timely. But you must never succumb. In a crisis, you will find that these distractions may easily take up to 80 per cent of your time. Your nights, or what is left of them after the work which you would have done during the day but for the distractions, will often be spent sleeplessly wondering whether this time you have not been too phlegmatic in decrying other people’s flights of fancy or too rash in extrapolating from too few facts in forming your own hypothesis. But if in all this you can use the remaining 20 per cent of your time in encouraging your sources, directing your staff, correlating the Intelligence pictures for yourself and presenting it in logical and clear reports, you will generally find yourself vindicated by events. And if you can persuade someone to take countermeasures in time, you may have the satisfaction of seeing danger averted for thousands of your unsuspecting countrymen.

  The future of Intelligence is hard. In the past war, the nature of the weapons, the brilliance of our sources and the mistakes of our enemies all weighed the balance in our favour. It may well not remain so in the future. But though the fortunes may vary, and its methods change, the principles will remain the same. And if in that war our work helped to clarify those principles, this may well be its most lasting contribution.

  If any one man would have carried my hopes that ability in Intelligence would ultimately win the day over the organizational disasters brought upon us by Blackett, he would have been Francis Crick, who was one of the Admiralty contributions to the post-war Scientific Intelligence effort. He wrote to me on 18th February 1947, the day before I gave the R.U.S.I. Lecture, saying, ‘I am opening the campaign for a central organization, and have
been to see Lee and Admiral Langley’. By this organization he meant a proper Scientific Intelligence staff, in contrast to the three disjointed sections that had been thrown together by the Service Ministries. He went on, ‘It would really help if they got another angle on all this, especially one founded on some experience. I wondered if you could find time to have a chat with Lee (he lives at the Cabinet Offices) while you were in town. Better still, to see Tizard himself. One point needs bringing out strongly. It’s no use reorganizing with just the same old gang. We must have someone rather more lively to head the thing’.

  I duly talked to Tizard, who had taken the chair at my R.U.S.I. Lecture, and an enquiry followed which resulted in Professor David Brunt being appointed in 1948 as permanent Chairman of the Joint Scientific and Technical Intelligence Committee, in place of the chairmanship which had rotated at three-monthly intervals between the several heads of the Scientific and Technical Intelligence sections belonging to the Services. There was little noticeable improvement, though, for Brunt had no staff of his own, and Crick left Intelligence to go to Cambridge where in 1962 he won the Nobel Prize for the elucidation of the Genetic Code.

  Brunt found his experience so exasperating that within a year he resigned to become Physical Secretary of the Royal Society in 1949, placing this comment on the Ministry of Defence files: ‘I am sure that if there is any one man in this country who will take on the job, knowing the true conditions, he must be unique, and either a saint or a fool’.

  Tizard, who himself had been called back as Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, sent for me and told me that he had been asked by the Joint Intelligence Committee to invite me to take the job on again. He warned that things were still in a very unsatisfactory state, and I ultimately wrote to him declining the invitation, saying

  The reasons which weigh most with me against returning are all connected with my work here. The Chair which I now hold suffered much through the War, and the Department needs a great deal of work to put it into a healthy condition; a change of Professor now would delay its progress very seriously.… In a few years’ time none of these arguments might be valid: the Department may be flourishing, and we may well have available younger physicists in the country who could do the job better than I can. In the meantime I see a major national need to produce such physicists, and I am prepared to do my bit towards it.

  All these arguments would of course go by the board if, say, war was going to break out within a year. As you know, I believe deeply in the need of this country for a good Intelligence Service, and I often said during the War that, having had the fun then, I was prepared to keep the flag flying in the duller times of peace. It was not of my own will that I did not do so, and if war were imminent I would return now.… Please convey my thanks to the Joint Intelligence Committee for the honour which they have done me in offering me the job. In view of what has been said on both sides in the past, I appreciate it probably more than they might expect.

  In the event, Dr. B. K. Blount was appointed. He had been Head of the Scientific Department of the Control Commission in Germany and besides being a distinguished chemist had parachuted into Greece with S.O.E. during the war. Following my earlier recommendation, he was given the title of Director of Scientific Intelligence with a seat on the Joint Intelligence Committee in parallel with the Directors of Naval, Military, and Air Intelligence; and the Service scientific sections were now made up into his Directorate in the Ministry of Defence and rescued from Bryanston Square to offices, again decrepit, but much closer to Whitehall. One old stumbling block remained in the way, as he related in the final summary of his experiences when in 1952, speaking of the future, he said: ‘First it is necessary to remove the anomalous arrangements for atomic energy intelligence, which are actively harmful to good Scientific Intelligence’. So in this respect the situation in 1952 was no better than in 1946, when the arrangements for atomic energy intelligence had been one of the main causes of my resignation. Blount himself resigned after three years in 1952, to become Deputy Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

  By this time Churchill was again Prime Minister, and he asked me to come back for a time to try to get things straight. Such a request I could not refuse, and the University agreed. It meant leaving my family behind in Aberdeen and once again abandoning research, but I returned to Whitehall in September 1952: and I gratefully found on my desk the legend ‘Sic Resurrexit Gloria Raketae’ which had been placed there by John Mapplebeck who, as a wing commander, had worked with me in the V-1-V-2 Summer of 1944 and who had recalled the departing notice I had then placed on my desk.

  I was promised that atomic energy intelligence would return to be part of the general Scientific Intelligence organization, and would be under my control. But I found that the Ministry of Defence was not what I had expected. Instead of the streamlined Chiefs of Staff organization that I had known during the war, there was now an administrative jungle of such inefficiency that, for example, papers sometimes came out over the signatures of the Chiefs of Staff, when in fact none of the three Chiefs of Staff had ever seen them. Part of the trouble was due to the fact that each of the three Services tended to send to the Ministry of Defence only their second-best officers, so as to keep their own ministries as strong as possible.

  The promise to bring back atomic intelligence into the normal Scientific Intelligence organization was not implemented even though the one argument that had been used to justify its independence, that of playing along with the Americans, had been completely abused. For what the Americans had in fact done was to follow my own wartime example regarding the organization of Scientific Intelligence and so had created a special Office of Scientific Intelligence inside the Central Intelligence Agency, and their atomic intelligence organization was part of this office. So if we were genuinely to march with the American arrangements, atomic energy intelligence should have been part of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence in the Ministry of Defence.

  American relations were in fact quite the happiest aspect of my experience. Thanks to Blount, they were already cordial before I took office, and if possible they became even more cordial. I spent June 1953 in America, crossing to California to see Bob Robertson, now the theoretical physicist in Pasadena associated with the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar Observatories. Like myself, he found that he could not refuse a call back to Defence work and had obtained leave to become head of the Weapon Systems Evaluation Group in the Pentagon.

  Although I did some useful things inside the Ministry of Defence, I could not justify prolonging my absence from the University, and so I left the Ministry again at the end of 1953, having recorded the strongest possible protest about the way in which things were still drifting. I pointed out that to keep atomic energy separate from Scientific Intelligence generally was the equivalent of keeping submarines out of Naval Intelligence or jet engines out of Air Intelligence; and I was also unhappy about the arrangements made regarding what has come to be known as Electronics Intelligence. Following Civil Service procedure, I demanded that the papers be laid before the Minister, who must then see me. He happened to be Field Marshal Lord Alexander, and I intended to tell him what I thought was wrong with the Ministry. But before I could start, he insisted on telling me how unhappy he was in his post, which he had never wanted. He had been much happier as Governor General of Canada but, as with me, he had been recalled by Winston and could not refuse. I felt so sorry for him that I spent most of the interview giving him advice on how to argue with Lord Cherwell at Cabinet meetings, because he said the Prof could always produce his slide rule and outwit him; but it was clear that I could make no headway with my own problem. As for what has happened since, I am not in a position to comment. Substantial improvements have obviously occurred, but it may be worth retailing the remark of a senior officer in Intelligence who a year or two ago had come across my protest of twenty years before, and said that the troubles to which I had then pointed had by no me
ans entirely been put right.

  It may be wondered why, with Churchillian backing, I could do so little. The fact was that I tried to play the game according to the rules inside the Ministry, without invoking Prime Ministerial intervention; and by the time that I did tell Churchill of the situation he was too exhausted to act. He had already had a stroke. After I left, the Ministry failed to find anyone to take my place; and the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence was down-graded and placed under the Director of the Joint Intelligence Bureau, so that Scientific Intelligence once again had no independent voice at the top level.

  Even when the organization is faultless, the reluctance of reputable scientists to give up active work in science for a spell in Intelligence is understandable. Some may well feel that it is a degrading activity for their talents, and that it is at best a dirty business, prying into other countries’ secrets. I do not share this view, for we must accept that struggles, military or otherwise, between individuals and nations are a fact of existence. And any individual or organization who thinks that he or it has developed something worthwhile is entitled, within limits, to safeguard its survival and further development. Since the consequent struggle will be better conducted the more an organization knows about its opponent—and since a struggle may not only be avoided but turned into co-operation if it becomes clear that the opponent does not represent a threat or if he has something better to offer—then a sensible nation will seek to be as well informed as possible about its opponents, potential or otherwise, and, for that matter, about its friends. It will therefore set up an Intelligence organization, and provided that this organization observes some moral limits in the methods that it employs, its task is an honourable one.