The Defence of the Realm (41 page)

At Liddell's request, Curry also prepared a brief, updated digest of Putlitz's intelligence to present to the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, who was part of Chamberlain's inner circle of foreign policy advisers. Hoare was the first former MI5 (and SIS) officer to become a cabinet minister,
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but had little sympathy with the current views of the Security Service on the perils of appeasement. Curry accompanied Kell on a visit to the Home Secretary – partly to support the Director, partly because, when Secretary of State for India in the early 1930s, Hoare had praised a book by Curry on the Indian police. They received a frosty welcome from the Home Secretary. When Kell reminded Hoare of his previous acquaintance with Curry, there was no flicker of recognition. The Director then handed over the digest of Putlitz's intelligence. According to Curry's later recollection: ‘As Hoare read it, the colour faded from his cheeks. He made a few brief comments, showed no desire to have the matter discussed or elaborated, and dismissed us.' Curry believed that Hoare had been shocked by Putlitz's insistence that ‘if we had stood firm at Munich, Hitler might have lost the initiative.'
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In reality, the Home Secretary was not so much shocked as in denial. Even in early March 1939 he was still looking forward to a new European ‘golden age'.
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Klop Ustinov reported that Putlitz was ‘extremely disconcerted' by the Munich agreement, complaining that, in passing on, at great personal risk, intelligence about Hitler's plans and intentions, he was ‘sacrificing himself to no purpose'.
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In January 1939, Curry and Ustinov arranged a secret meeting for Putlitz with Vansittart in the hope of reassuring him. According to Putlitz's account of the meeting, Van told him:

Well, Putlitz, I understand you are not too pleased with us. I know Munich was a disgraceful business, but I can assure you that this sort of thing is over and done with. Even our English forbearance has its limits. Next time it will be impossible for Chamberlain to allow himself to be bamboozled by a scrap of paper on which Hitler has scribbled a few words expressing his ardent desire for peace.

Vansittart promised Putlitz asylum if he ever decided to defect.
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Curry was told, probably by Vansittart, that MI5's intelligence from Putlitz and other German sources ‘contributed materially – if only as a minor factor – towards Mr Chamberlain's reformulation of policy', including his decision in April 1939 to introduce conscription.
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Curry was well aware, however, that, in general, MI5 intelligence had only a limited impact on Number Ten:

I do not wish to attach too great importance to our reports. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary had available to them a mass of information obtained from foreign statesmen and experienced and well informed officials in our Embassies and Consulates abroad. These no doubt furnished a fuller and better-informed assessment of the whole situation than Putlitz could offer from his somewhat restricted point of view . . .

None the less Putlitz's intelligence was ‘so far as we knew unique in that it gave us inside information based on German official documents and the remarks of Hitler and some of his principal followers'.
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Putlitz was certainly far better informed than the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, who was, Cadogan believed, ‘completely bewitched by his German friends', and reported myopically that the German compass was ‘pointing towards peace'.
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The Prime Minister was equally misinformed. ‘All the information I get', wrote Chamberlain cheerfully on 19 February, ‘seems to point in the direction of peace.' Vansittart pointed emphatically in the opposite direction.
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Next day he sent Halifax a report, probably based chiefly on intelligence from Putlitz,
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that Hitler had decided to liquidate Czechoslovakia. By early March Van was predicting a German coup in Prague during the week of the 12th to the 19th.
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Kell called at the Foreign Office on 11 March ‘to raise [Cadogan's] hair with tales of Germany going into Czechoslovakia in [the] next 48 hours'. That evening Cadogan's private secretary, Gladwyn Jebb, rang up with further ‘hair-raising' reports from SIS of a German invasion planned for the 14th. On 13 March SIS reported that the Germans were about ‘to walk in'. Neither Chamberlain nor his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was yet convinced by the intelligence
warnings. Halifax could still see no evidence that the Germans were ‘planning mischief in any particular quarter'. But he added as an afterthought: ‘I hope they may not be taking, even as I write, an unhealthy interest in the Slovak situation!' The German interest by now was very unhealthy indeed. On 15 March Hitler's troops occupied Prague and announced the annexation of the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia became a vassal state. Van was bitter about the rejection of his warnings. ‘Nothing seems any good,' he wrote morosely when he heard the news from Prague, ‘it seems as if nobody will listen to or believe me.' Cadogan admitted to his diary that he had been wrong and Vansittart right: ‘I must say it is turning out – at present – as Van predicted and as I never believed it would.'
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On 18 March Chamberlain finally acknowledged to the cabinet that ‘No reliance could be placed on any of the assurances given by the Nazi leaders'
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– a conclusion which the Security Service had put formally to the cabinet secretary almost three years earlier.
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The Security Service's intelligence, however, still carried little weight in the Foreign Office. In early April, Dick White, now Klop Ustinov's case officer,
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visited the Foreign Office to deliver a warning from Putlitz that Italy was preparing to invade Albania. He was given a sceptical reception.
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At a cabinet meeting on 5 April Halifax discounted reports of an impending Italian invasion. Two days later, on Good Friday, Italy occupied Albania. After attending a three-hour Good Friday service Halifax met Cadogan and ‘decided we can't
do
anything to stop it'.
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Chamberlain took the invasion as a personal affront. ‘It cannot be denied', he wrote rather pathetically to his sister, ‘that Mussolini has behaved to me like a sneak and a cad.'
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The limited impact of the Security Service's intelligence on German policy reflected the broader confusion of British intelligence assessment. The Joint Intelligence Committee, set up in 1936 on the initiative of the Chiefs of Staff, had yet to establish itself, lacked an intelligence staff and was still largely ignored by the Foreign Office. The confusion of Easter 1939 when the Admiralty took seriously wholly unfounded intelligence reports of Luftwaffe plans to attack the Home Fleet in harbour, while the Foreign Office dismissed accurate warnings of the invasion of Albania, brought matters to a head. The Chiefs of Staff now demanded that, as a minimum response to current intelligence problems, all intelligence – both political and military – which required quick decisions should be collated and assessed by a central body on which the Foreign Office would be represented.
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Cadogan acknowledged that he was ‘daily inundated by all sorts of reports' and found it virtually impossible to sort the wheat from
the chaff. Even when he correctly identified accurate intelligence reports, ‘It just happened that these were correct; we had no means of evaluating their reliability at the time of their receipt.' After the traumatic Easter weekend the Foreign Office gave way to service pressure for a Situation Report Centre (SRC) under a Foreign Office chairman which would assess intelligence and issue daily reports ‘in order that any emergency measures which may have to be taken should be based only on the most reliable and carefully coordinated information'.
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Two months later, the SRC proposed its own amalgamation with the JIC. In July the Foreign Office, hitherto only an irregular attender at the JIC, agreed to provide the chairman.
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There were, however, no overnight miracles. Serious improvement in intelligence assessment had to await the Second World War.

There were also significant pre-war weaknesses in counter-espionage. The official history of British security and counter-intelligence in the Second World War by Sir Harry Hinsley and the former Deputy Director General of MI5, Anthony Simkins, published in 1990, makes the remarkable claim, since widely repeated, that before the war neither the Security Service nor SIS even knew the name of the main German espionage organization, the Abwehr, or of its head Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.
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In reality there are pre-war references to both the Abwehr and Canaris in MI5 records. The Service also referred to the Abwehr in liaison reports to the United States.
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Judging from pre-war MI5 and SIS records, however, in the mid-1930s both Services still regarded the Abwehr as first and foremost a
counter
espionage service.
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So far as Britain was concerned, this belief was broadly true. The Abwehr did not begin its transformation into a fully fledged foreign intelligence service until after the Nazi conquest of power,
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and, following the signature of the Anglo-German naval agreement in 1935, Hitler temporarily forbade the Abwehr to conduct espionage against Britain in order not to risk prejudicing further improvements in Anglo-German relations.
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Though reduced in scale until reauthorized by Hitler in 1937, some German espionage in Britain continued.
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Among the Abwehr's British agents was Major Christopher Draper, a First World War fighter ace who had won both the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre, had had a brief post-war career in the RAF (which still used military ranks) and subsequently became a stunt pilot and film actor. Draper's penchant for flying under bridges (including Tower Bridge) earned him the nickname the ‘Mad Major', which he later used as the title of his autobiography. In 1933, a year after meeting Hitler at a Munich air show, he was asked by the London correspondent of the Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
to provide intelligence on the RAF. Draper reported the approach to the Security Service and agreed to become a double agent – the first to operate against Germany since the First World War. In June 1933, with MI5's approval, he travelled to Hamburg to meet his Abwehr case officer. For the next three years he sent disinformation prepared by MI5, disguised (as instructed by the Abwehr) as correspondence on stamp-collecting, to a cover address (Box 629) in Hamburg. Lacking the interdepartmental system for assembling disinformation developed for the Double-Cross System in the Second World War, however, MI5 began to run out of plausible falsehoods of interest to the Germans. By 1937 the Abwehr was expressing ‘grave dissatisfaction' with the quality of Draper's information. In the course of the year it broke contact with him.
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By maintaining an HOW on letters to the Hamburg box number used by Draper to correspond with his case officer, the Security Service discovered that a Scottish hairdresser, Mrs Jessie Jordan, was being used by the Abwehr to forward correspondence to some of its foreign agents. In January 1938 an HOW on Jordan's address led to the discovery of a letter from an Abwehr agent in the United States, codenamed CROWN, which contained details of a bizarre plot to chloroform and kidnap an American army colonel who had in his possession classified documents on US coastal defences. CROWN was identified as Guenther Rumrich, a twenty-sevenyear-old US army deserter, who was convicted with several of his accomplices in an Abwehr spy-ring at a highly publicized trial.
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As a result of US inter-agency confusion, others who had been indicted succeeded in escaping. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, and the prosecuting attorney blamed each other. The judge, to Hoover's fury, blamed the FBI. Leon G. Turrou, the FBI special agent in charge of Rumrich's interrogation, was so poorly briefed that he confused the Abwehr with the Gestapo.
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Though the Security Service was far better informed than the FBI, there were large gaps in its understanding of the organization of pre-war German intelligence.
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Possibly the largest was its lack of awareness of the Etappe Dienst naval network, eventually discovered as a result of German records captured in 1945. Post-war analysis revealed that, though the pre-war Security Service had been unaware of the network to which they belonged, it had successfully identified a number of Etappe Dienst agents. Among them was Otto Kurt Dehn, who arrived in Britain in 1936 as managing director of a newly founded cinematographic film company, Emelco, despite – as B Branch noted when applying successfully for an HOW on him – having no previous experience in cinematography, film or advertising.
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When the Etappe Dienst was taken over by the Abwehr in 1939, it
had a total of thirty-one agents operating against British targets.
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But most of these must have been visiting rather than resident agents, since, after a small number of arrests on the outbreak of war, it now appears that German intelligence had no significant agents operating in Britain, except for a British-controlled double agent and his three sub-agents.
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Some of the pre-war attempts by the Abwehr to obtain intelligence on RAF installations which were known to the Security Service probably provided information of value to the Luftwaffe. However, most of the German espionage detected by MI5 during the 1930s was, Curry later concluded, ‘run on a very crude basis'. Many of the agents provided ‘information of no importance in order to extract the maximum of reward for the minimum of effort'.
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