The Defence of the Realm (46 page)

Petrie's report, completed on 13 February 1941, concluded, unsurprisingly, that the rapid and poorly planned wartime expansion of the Security Service had led to organizational breakdown and confusion, best exemplified in B Division, which currently had 133 officers distributed among twenty-nine sections, which were themselves divided into approximately seventy to eighty sub-sections. Crocker's appointment as joint head of the Division had only increased the confusion. Petrie strongly supported proposals (implemented after he took over) to lighten B Division's load by moving ‘alien control' (including internment issues) and countersubversion to, respectively, a new E Division and a new F Division (both based at Blenheim). His report also implied that giving Swinton ‘executive control' of MI5 had been ‘an unfortunate mistake'. Outside interference had lowered MI5 morale.
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Before becoming director general in April 1941, wrote Petrie later, ‘I got the principle of the D.G. being master in his own house recognised and endorsed.'
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Kell and Harker had had the title of director; Petrie was the Service's first director general.
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Harker, who stayed on as Petrie's deputy, became deputy director general (DDG). Charles Butler, head of A Division (administration and Registry),
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Guy
Liddell, head of B Division (counter-espionage), and H. I. ‘Harry' Allen, head of C Division (mainly vetting) and D Division (protective security and travel control), were given the title of director. Theodore ‘Ted' Turner, head of the new E Division, and Jack Curry, head of the new F Division, were made deputy directors.
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Dick White, Assistant Director of B Division when Petrie took over, later described the new Director General as ‘one of the best man managers I ever met'.
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Ashton Roskill agreed: ‘Solid in appearance and in mind, [Petrie] made it his business to know the essentials of his job, but did not hesitate to delegate. I doubt if he had more than a B+ mind but he used it, made few – if any – mistakes, and combined courtesy with firmness.'
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Norman Himsworth, an officer in Maxwell Knight's section, remembered him as ‘A real gentleman. He would speak broad Scots when he was annoyed but perfect English when he was not.'
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Catherine Weldsmith (née Morgan-Smith), later the last lady superintendent, who was deputed to show Petrie around Blenheim, found him ‘very easy and nice about it – he was rather a shy man.'
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The DG was acutely security-conscious. One of the secretaries at St James's Street recalls that ‘He always burned his own Top Secret stuff in a fire bucket.'
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Almost all accounts of Petrie's appointment as DG agree with Curry that he ‘restored confidence – almost immediately internally and more gradually among the officers and Departments with whom [MI5] was in external relation . . .'
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By the autumn of 1941 the Security Service had completed an internal transformation as striking as the move of its main premises ‘from prison to palace'. Its resources on the eve of war – with only thirty-six officers and 133 secretarial and Registry staff – were below the level that would nowadays be considered necessary for a security service with such wide responsibilities and the reasonable expectation of a major enemy intelligence offensive to function at all. The Secret Service Committee had given no serious thought to its future leadership, allowing Kell to continue on a yearly basis as long as, in his own words, he remained ‘compos mentis' in order to avoid having to take a longer-term decision. Its choice of Harker to succeed him in June 1940 appears to have been taken without any attempt to seek the views even of senior staff who would very probably have expressed some of the reservations which surfaced soon after he became director. During the first year of the war, even with effective leadership, the Service would have been unable to cope with the unreasonable demands made of it. What remains surprising is less that, by the time of Kell's dismissal, as Curry acknowledged, MI5 had been reduced to ‘a state which can only be described as chaotic' than that, over the next year,
it achieved a total dominance over German intelligence which it retained for the rest of the war.
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The transformation of the Security Service was made possible, in part, by new leadership in the person of Sir David Petrie. At least equally important was the ability of a group of able pre-war officers – Guy Liddell, Dick White and Tar Robertson chief among them – to win the respect and harness the often remarkable talents of the wartime recruits. One of the keys to the Service's wartime success from 1941 onwards was its
esprit de corps
. It was, recalled the Oxford historian Sir John Masterman a generation later, ‘a team of congenial people who worked together harmoniously and unselfishly, and among whom rank counted for little and character for much'.
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Though not all were as enthusiastic as Masterman,
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many were.
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An opinion survey by outside consultants in 2000 reported that 98 per cent of staff believed in the importance of their work and 87 per cent expressed pride in working for the Service – among the highest ratings the consultants had recorded inside or outside the public service.
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A similar survey in 1945 might well have produced a similar result. Even for Victor Rothschild, who had no shortage of glittering careers ahead of him, leaving the Service after the Second World War was a deeply emotional moment. He wrote to Petrie's successor as DG, Sir Percy Sillitoe, who was appointed from outside:

I have been in the Security Service now for six years, and the idea of officially resigning from it is painful and distressing in a way which perhaps you, who have not seen much of us, may find difficult to understand. Most of the people who have been as intimately associated with it as I have been, have developed an affection for the Office as a whole and the staff in particular which I am certain is most unusual in a large Government Department.
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Few of the Security Service's wartime successes were known to other government departments. The reasons for the Service policy of hiding its light under a bushel went some way beyond the demands of operational security. Petrie preferred to keep his contacts with Whitehall to a minimum. Two years after becoming director general, he admitted to Duff Cooper (Swinton's successor as head of the Security Executive) that he was a bad ‘publicity merchant' for the Service:

I have lived so long abroad that I had comparatively few contacts in London, and I never cared to extend them beyond what was necessary for business purposes. So it is a fact that many people, even some who ought to know better, have only the vaguest idea of M.I. 5 and what it does. This certainly does not hurt our work –
quite the contrary – but it bears rather hardly on the department and the many able officers it comprises.
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Unlike Stewart Menzies, the Chief of SIS, Petrie made no attempt to forge a personal relationship with Churchill, though there was much about the Security Service's wartime work which would have fascinated (and eventually did fascinate) the Prime Minister. Had Petrie briefed Churchill, he would have been able to counter dismissive comments by Desmond Morton, as late as 1943, that ‘MI5 tends to see dangerous men too freely and to lack that knowledge of the world and sense of perspective which the Home Secretary rightly considers essential.'
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At the very moment when Morton made this claim, MI5's double agents were achieving unprecedented success in deceiving the enemy. It did not occur to Petrie to send Churchill a monthly report until Duff Cooper suggested it in March 1943.
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One of the few parts of Security Service work to come to Churchill's attention from other sources was the extraordinary bravery of Victor Rothschild as head of its counter-sabotage department in defusing German bombs, meticulously recording his every move by field telephone in case he was killed in the attempt. (Rothschild owed much of his success to the expertise in micro-manipulation which he had acquired as a young zoologist at Cambridge University dissecting frogs' eggs and sea-urchins.) But, when Churchill asked Petrie in February 1944 about Rothschild's success in defusing a German bomb hidden in a crate of Spanish onions which was timed to explode in a British port, the DG's response was so off-hand that it amounted to a brush-off – or, as Rothschild described it, ‘a raspberry'.
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The head of Churchill's Defence Office, General Sir Hastings ‘Pug' Ismay, replied that the Prime Minister would not be content with the information supplied and asked for more.
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When it was provided, Churchill took the personal decision to award Rothschild the George Medal.
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Petrie's relations with Churchill were less successful than Kell's had been thirty years before. Churchill's willingness as home secretary in 1910–11 to make a major extension to the HOW system and his encouragement to chief constables to collaborate with Kell were crucial to the successes of MI5 counter-espionage before the First World War.
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Since Petrie regarded the early history of the Security Service as an irrelevance,
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he may well have been ignorant of Churchill's important role in it. His reluctance to take the Prime Minister fully into his confidence during the Second World War, however, had some justification. Petrie probably believed that, if Churchill knew more about Service operations, he might jump to hasty
conclusions and interfere, as he did in the North African campaigns in 1941–2 when German decrypts convinced him that Rommel was much weaker than he was.
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Though Churchill's enthusiasm for intelligence far exceeded that of any previous British prime minister, Petrie was right to be nervous about where that enthusiasm might lead him.
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1

Deception

The Second World War, like most of its predecessors, found Britain at best half ready. The War Office knew so little about Germany's immediate plan of campaign that, misled by mistaken intelligence reports over the past year,
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it feared the Luftwaffe would attempt an immediate ‘knock-out blow' against London. At 11.27 on the morning of Sunday 3 September, barely a quarter of an hour after the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had broadcast the news that the nation was at war, air-raid sirens wailed over the capital. War Office staff in Whitehall from top brass to junior clerks filed down to the air-raid shelter in the basement. There they listened apprehensively to a series of muffled explosions above them which a former military attaché with first-hand experience of air-raids during the Spanish Civil War identified as a mixture of anti-aircraft fire and bombs dropping. When the all-clear sounded, the War Office staff emerged from the basement and discovered to their surprise that there had been no air-raid, and that the ‘explosions' had been caused by the noise of slamming office doors echoing down the lift shafts.
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In reality, the Luftwaffe was not yet capable of launching a ‘knock-out blow'. It was unable to begin the London Blitz until after the conquest of France and the Low Countries in the following year. The intervening eight months in the west were a period of ‘Phoney War', sometimes almost as surreal as the first hours of the war in the War Office basement. On 5 September the Secretary of State for Air insisted that ‘there was no question of our bombing even the munitions factories at Essen, which were private property.' Leaflets were dropped instead. Until Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940 no British bombs were dropped on German territory.
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The intelligence war, however, began immediately, and for some months Germany seemed to have the upper hand. In less than a fortnight, the Security Service lost its most important German source. The diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who for the past sixteen months had been stationed at the German legation in The Hague,
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realized that the security of the
local SIS station must have been breached when the German ambassador showed him a list of German agents in the Netherlands identical to one he had given SIS.
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Putlitz concluded that it ‘could only be a matter of time before he was discovered and dealt with', and sought refuge in Britain with his partner and valet, Willy Schneider. On 15 September they arrived in London and were welcomed by Dick White, who found them temporary accommodation in his brother's flat. Though Putlitz's belief that the SIS station in The Hague must be penetrated was later shown to be correct, at the time it was not taken very seriously. ‘The general impression', noted Guy Liddell, ‘is that the whole situation had rather got on his nerves and that he felt he could not go on.'
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For the Security Service the only compensation for the loss of Putlitz was that another of its agents, a German-born British subject, Mrs ‘Susan Barton' (the name by which she was usually known within the Service), seemed on the point of penetrating the German legation in The Hague. ‘Barton' had been working as a ‘casual agent' for several years, providing information on the German colony in Britain before moving to the Netherlands in 1939.
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Once in The Hague ‘Barton' renewed contact with Lili, an old friend from Germany who was working as the secretary of the German naval attaché, Captain Besthorn. Besthorn took a liking to the attractive Mrs ‘Barton', who encouraged his interest in her. Lili wrote to her on one occasion, ‘The Captain wants to be remembered [to you], he was very pleased about your letter written specially for him! Oh these men . . .' When Ustinov returned to Britain after Putlitz's defection, ‘Barton' moved in with Lili and reported on 25 October that Besthorn was seeking authorization from Berlin to offer her a job. Lili, however, seemed jealous since ‘she believes herself to be in love' with Besthorn.
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