The Defence of the Realm (42 page)

The Security Service remained understandably worried that ‘a cloud of agents of low quality served to hide a few good ones' which it had failed to detect.
¹⁴²
One of the pre-war networks which most impressed MI5 when it was revealed by post-war interrogations was the Abwehr naval intelligence station in Bremen, which seems to have modelled its operations, at least in part, on those of the Etappe Dienst, using members of German steamship companies and other businessmen travelling from Bremen to the UK. Its head, Captain Erich Pfeiffer, was proud of what it achieved after its expansion in 1937. He claimed that there was much excitement in the Kriegsmarine when his agents discovered that the King George V class of battleships were to be fitted with quadruple gun turrets. Pfeiffer further claimed that intelligence from his agents had influenced the design of the anti-aircraft defences on the pocket battleships
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst.
¹⁴³
Such claims are difficult to corroborate. The general impression created by the evidence currently available is that Pfeiffer ran a wellorganized Abwehr network, more remarkable for the quantity than for the quality of the intelligence it gathered. The file of one of Pfeiffer's agents, Fritz Block, an engineer working for the Hamburg/Bremen Africa Line, contains 117 intelligence reports, with photographs, on British seaports, airports, industry, shipbuilding, warships, radio stations and troop movements, for which he was paid large amounts of money.
¹⁴⁴
It is highly unlikely, however, that any of Pfeiffer's agents were actually in Britain when war began.

By the outbreak of war, the Security Service had begun to operate a double agent against Nazi Germany who was to prove far more successful than Major Draper. The man whom MI5 considered the ‘fons et origo' of what became known as the Double-Cross System was a Welsh-born electrical engineer codenamed SNOW who had emigrated to Canada as a child
and returned to live in London. Early in 1936 he had begun to work part-time for SIS, reporting on his business visits to German shipyards. Later in the year, however, MI5 discovered a letter from SNOW during a routine check of correspondence addressed to Box 629, Hamburg, the Abwehr cover address previously used by Draper. When challenged, SNOW confessed that he had joined the Abwehr but claimed unconvincingly that he had done so only to penetrate it in the interests of SIS. His English interrogators condescendingly described him as ‘a typical Welsh “underfed” type, very short, bony face, ill-shaped ears, disproportionately small for size of man, ‘shifty look'. Though SNOW continued to supply SIS and MI5 with details of some of his dealings with the Abwehr, his ‘shifty look' continued to inspire suspicion. T. A. ‘Tar' Robertson, SNOW's MI5 case officer, decided to leave him on a loose rein in the knowledge that, if war came, he could be arrested under emergency regulations. However much SNOW concealed from MI5, it is clear that he also defrauded the Abwehr, claiming to have at least a dozen sub-agents in England who, MI5 concluded, probably all ‘existed only in SNOW's imagination'.
¹⁴⁵

In August 1939 SNOW left for Hamburg in the company of his lover (an Englishwoman of German extraction) and a man whom MI5 believed he intended to recruit for the Abwehr. On 4 September, soon after his return to England, he arranged a meeting with a Special Branch inspector at Waterloo Station. To his surprise, he was served with a detention order and taken to Wandsworth Prison. Once in jail, SNOW quickly revealed that his radio transmitter was in the Victoria Station left-luggage office and offered to use it to communicate with the Abwehr under MI5 control. Robertson agreed. SNOW's transmitter was installed in his cell and, after some difficulty, he succeeded in sending what proved to be a momentous message to his Abwehr controller, Major Nikolaus Ritter: ‘Must meet you in Holland at once. Bring weather code. Radio town and hotel Wales ready.' The ‘weather code', SNOW explained, was for transmitting the daily weather reports he was expected to send. The reference to Wales related to an assignment given him by Ritter to recruit a Welsh nationalist to organize sabotage in South Wales. Ritter quickly agreed to a meeting.
¹⁴⁶
Though of only minor importance at the time, the deception of the Abwehr begun in SNOW's Wandsworth prison cell was eventually to grow into the Double-Cross System, which played a crucial role in the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944.

Unknown to the Security Service, however, just as its deception of the Abwehr was beginning, the penetration of the SIS station in The Hague
by German intelligence had begun to put at risk MI5's most important source, Wolfgang zu Putlitz. In October 1938, a twenty-six-year-old Dutchman, Folkert van Koutrik, who was working as the trusted assistant of SIS's head agent in the Netherlands, was turned by the Abwehr and worked thereafter as a double agent, submitting weekly reports which included details of British agents in the Netherlands and what the SIS station knew about German agents.
¹⁴⁷
Soon after the outbreak of war, Putlitz realized that the station had been penetrated and that he must accept Vansittart's offer of asylum.
¹⁴⁸

On the eve of war, however, Putlitz, still with no inkling that he was in danger, was in unusually confident mood, buoyed up by the belief that Britain was at last resolved to stand up to Hitler. Guy Liddell noted in his diary on 30 August:

Klop has sent in a report which indicates that the Germans have got the jitters. It is rather a case of order, counter-order, disorder. There have been recriminations between Nazi Party and non-Party men. Non-Party men are saying: ‘We always told you that you get us into this mess, and you will be the first people to suffer for it.' P[utlitz] has the impression that Hitler is on the run and that nothing should be done to provide him with a golden bridge to make his getaway.
¹⁴⁹

Putlitz's was one of a number of over-optimistic intelligence reports from various sources which reached Whitehall during the final days of peace, prompted by a delay in the planned German attack on Poland, which suggested that Hitler or his high command were having last-minute doubts about going to war. ‘I can't help thinking', Cadogan told his diary on 30 August, ‘[that the] Germans are in an awful fix. In fact it's obvious even if one discounts rumours of disturbances.' ‘It
does
seem to me', he wrote at about midnight on 31 August, ‘[that] Hitler is hesitant and trying all sorts of dodges, including last-minute bluff.'
¹⁵⁰
A few hours later, at dawn on 1 September, German troops crossed the border into Poland and the last hopes of peace were dashed. Two days later Britain was at war.

Section C

The Second World War

Introduction

The Security Service and its Wartime Staff: ‘From Prison to Palace'

During the first year of the Second World War the Security Service made what one of its staff called a transition ‘from prison to palace'.
¹
The prison was Wormwood Scrubs, the Service's first wartime headquarters. Blenheim Palace, to which most staff transferred in October 1940, was the birthplace of Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister five months earlier. MI5's arrival at the Scrubs on 27 August 1939, made necessary by the need for more wartime office space than was then available in Thames House, was so sudden that some staff found unemptied chamberpots in the cells which became their offices.
²
Prisoners remained in several of the cell blocks and were sometimes seen exercising in the yard. ‘Don't go near them,' one of the warders warned female staff. ‘Some of them ain't seen no women for years.'
³
Other prisoners, however, had. The ex-public-school ‘Mayfair Playboys', who had been imprisoned earlier in the year for robbing highclass jewellers, had danced with some Registry staff at debutantes' balls during the London season.
⁴
The Playboys' leader, the twenty-two-year-old Old Etonian Victor Hervey, the future sixth Marquess of Bristol, was later said to have provided some of the inspiration for the ‘Pink Panther'.
⁵

The prison buildings, complained Milicent Bagot, ‘appeared never to have been ventilated since their erection and their smell was appalling.'
⁶
The cell doors had no handles or locks on the inside. So, as one Wormwood Scrubs veteran recalls, staff ‘stood a good chance of being locked in by unwary visitors turning the outside door handle on leaving. At first there were no telephones in the cells, and with the rooms themselves soundproofed, it was possible for you to be shut in for hours before anyone noticed that you were not around.'
⁷
The dreariness of the prison surroundings was reinforced by the strict secretarial economy measures ordered by Kell, in line with those implemented in the War Office: ‘Single spacing must be used, wide margins avoided, and both sides of the paper used whenever practicable. Quarto size paper must be used in the place of foolscap whenever this will effect economy.'
⁸
A Branch sent further
instructions on the conservation of used blotting paper, which, for security reasons, had hitherto been destroyed at the end of every working day. Henceforth it was to be placed in a locked cupboard overnight and reused for as long as possible.
⁹
In an attempt to maintain morale amid these straitened working conditions, Kell's secretary arranged for a ladies' hairdresser to visit the prison.
¹⁰
Miss Dicker, the Lady Superintendent, also relaxed the previously inflexible female dress code. Because of the open prison staircases, visible from below, women were for the first time allowed to wear trousers.
¹¹
For the only time in MI5 history, the working day ended with the blowing of a bugle to remind staff to draw the curtains before the beginning of the night-time black-out.
¹²

Wartime restrictions were briefly suspended at Christmas. Constance Kell, who helped run the canteen, later recalled:

We managed to have a Christmas dinner at the office canteen and another branch of our large community gave a Christmas party and presents were handed out . . . it was a real break in our busy days to have this gay afternoon – there was a splendid spirit everywhere, a spirit of camaraderie, which drew together the whole people . . . There was something about Kell himself that inspired that will to do and to help in every way possible.
¹³

Despite the personal affection he inspired in most staff and his wife's rose-tinted recollections of Christmas in the Scrubs, Kell, though less than a year older than Churchill, was well past his best. By the outbreak of war he had been director for thirty years, longer than the head of any other British government department or agency in the twentieth century. Thirtysix years old when he founded the Service in 1909, he was nearly sixty-six when the Second World War began. In December 1938, having reached what he called ‘the respectable age of 65' in the previous month, he wrote to Sir Alexander Cadogan, PUS at the Foreign Office and
ex officio
member of the (then inactive) Secret Service Committee, to ask, ‘in the interests of the Security Service, that something definite should be ordained with regard to my future': ‘. . . I would suggest, if my work has been approved of, that my services should be retained on a yearly basis, provided I am compos mentis and do not feel the burden too heavy.'
¹⁴

The response to Kell's letter suggests that no serious thought had been given in Whitehall to the future management of the Security Service. Cadogan passed the letter on to Sir Warren Fisher, head of the civil service and chairman of the Security Service Committee, with the comment that Kell seemed ‘active enough to carry on his present work efficiently, though one cannot of course tell how long that will continue to be the case. I should
be quite content to see him continue for as long as he can . . .'
¹⁵
Fisher saw Kell in January 1939 and agreed that he should stay on, apparently on the yearly contract he had proposed.
¹⁶
A year later, however, Kell was in declining health and finding it difficult to cope with the huge increase in wartime work.
¹⁷

Among the clearest evidence of Kell's shortcomings was his failure to learn from his own past experience. He made no serious preparation for the rapid recruitment which the experience of the First World War should have taught him would follow the outbreak of the Second. According to a later report by his main wartime successor, Sir David Petrie:

When the war broke out, each officer ‘tore around' to rope in likely people; when they knew of none themselves, they asked their acquaintances. Occasionally recruits who were brought in knew of other ‘possibles'. Various Ministries also contributed surplus staff. In much the same way, retired officers came to notice, and new people continued to be got by the same processes . . . If I am correctly informed, there have been cases in which recruits have been taken on by divisions (or sections) without so much as informing Administration.
¹⁸

Though somewhat chaotic, ‘tearing around' by MI5 officers succeeded in bringing into the Service a remarkable array of academic, legal and other talent. Dick White recruited his former history tutor at Christ Church, (Sir) J. C. Masterman, later vice chancellor of Oxford University.
¹⁹
Guy Liddell's recruits included the brilliant young zoologist Victor (third Baron) Rothschild, heir to a banking dynasty, an accomplished jazz pianist and one of Britain's most gifted polymaths, who was assembling the finest collection of eighteenth-century English books and manuscripts in private hands. Rothschild founded MI5's first counter-sabotage department (B
1C
) in a cell in Wormwood Scrubs, as well as maintaining a laboratory at his own expense. He in turn talent-spotted a friend he had first met at Trinity College, Cambridge: the leading (though traitorous) art historian Anthony Blunt. Rothschild's first wife asked early in their marriage whether it was really necessary to invite Blunt so frequently to dinner. ‘Darling,' replied Rothschild, ‘you are talking of a saint.'
²⁰
MI5's wartime recruits from the law included six future judges – Patrick Barry, Edward Cussen, Helenus ‘Buster' Milmo, Henry ‘Toby' Pilcher, Edward Blanchard Stamp and John Stephenson – as well as a series of other able barristers and solicitors. Among the solicitors was Martin Furnival Jones, who went on to become director general of MI5 from 1965 to 1972.
²¹
One of the barristers, Sir Ashton Roskill QC, later commented that the overall calibre of the wartime recruits was ‘too high'.
²²
In retrospect Dick White agreed. ‘In the national
interest', he told Masterman, ‘I think that we appropriated too much talent. The demand for men of ability in other departments was enormous and perhaps we were a bit greedy.'
²³