All the King's Men (7 page)

The idea had immense appeal to the new PM who, after just a few weeks in the job, had had to contend with the British Army’s ignominious retreat from the shores of Dunkirk. If Britons could return to Europe, even clandestinely,
well then, this was better than sitting at home licking their wounds.

At a meeting at the Foreign Office on 1 July, at which the new Head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, was present, it was agreed that this new service would be established without delay. As it would operate abroad and under cover, Menzies naturally assumed that it would come under the wing of MI6 and the Foreign Office. However, that assumption did not take account of coalition politics. Churchill’s wartime National Government contained representatives from every political party. A somewhat paranoid Labour Party made it a condition of their joining the National Government that they must be given responsibility for one of the secret services. Labour had assumed this would be MI5. The Conservatives were reluctant to agree, but the creation of a new secret service presented Churchill with the solution. The Labour intellectual, Hugh Dalton, was made Minister for Economic Warfare and given responsibility for the new organization.

When news of this arrangement reached Claude Dansey he threw up his hands and declared, ‘It’s a disaster.’
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He urged Menzies to try to halt the arrangement before it was too late, but Menzies, a little more attuned to the politics of the situation, knew how impossible that would be. Nevertheless, he sympathized with Dansey. A new secret service, not only completely separate from MI6, but not even under the umbrella of the same ministry, operating clandestine networks of agents behind enemy lines – it contradicted the most fundamental principles upon which MI6 was founded.

Even though the new service would not be responsible for intelligence matters, the very fact of its existence behind enemy lines meant that it would inevitably collect some secret information from the Continent.
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sources of foreign intelligence: it conjured up spectres of some of the intelligence disasters of the last war.

As Menzies had predicted, Churchill was not easily
diverted from his course, and at a meeting on 22 July ‘C’ agreed with the proposed arrangement. His only compensation was an assurance that all intelligence, no matter what its source, would have to be channelled through MI6, who would digest it and be responsible for its distribution. Unfortunately, one major consequence for MI6 had escaped Menzies’ attention. The original plan was to create this new organization out of an amalgamation of the subversion and propaganda outfit at Electra House, Military Intelligence (Research) and MI6’s own Section D (Sabotage). Lord Halifax, the then Foreign Secretary, had agreed with Hugh Dalton that Section D was to be shifted across, in toto. Although Dansey knew what was going on, for some reason Menzies did not. It wasn’t until 5 September that he learnt that an entire department of his empire was no longer there. No one had thought to tell him…
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Now Menzies had both personal and professional reasons for disliking this new outfit. He, however, was forced to accept the situation. Dansey was not. Section D was full of men Dansey knew well. Though they were all professionals to a man, how could anyone expect an officer to be loyal to MI6 on Friday, and then loyal to completely new masters on Monday?

This new organization was, of course, the Special Operations Executive – the SOE. It began as a unit made up of three main sections: Subversion, Sabotage and Research. The core of the organization took over Section D’s old premises in St Ermin’s Hotel, close to MI6 at Broadway Buildings. In October it moved to its famous address at 64 Baker Street. Eventually the Subversion section was hived off and formed into another separate organization, the Political Warfare Executive, and the Research section seemed to atrophy through inactivity. That left the area of expertise for which SOE is historically famous, Sabotage.

Dansey made certain from the beginning that he would exert as much influence as possible, without actually being
on the staff. The first and most important area to be dealt with was recruitment. Dansey wanted to get as many of his people as possible inside before they got down to work. Hugh Dalton, the Labour Minister responsible for SOE, made it absolutely clear he wanted no one from MI6 in the top ranks of SOE. Nevertheless he was perfectly happy to seek Menzies’ advice about the post of Director. Dansey and Menzies thought hard about this question and finally came up with Sir Frank Nelson, at that time a Conservative back-bencher. Menzies’ recommendation went with the advice that he would find it impossible to co-operate with a Director of the SOE who had not had some earlier experience in clandestine work.
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Dalton agreed, Nelson got the job and Dansey was delighted. Sir Frank Nelson had been his ‘Z man’ in Basle before the war, and the two men understood each other perfectly.

Dansey never disguised his dislike for the SOE. Its existence was an interference with the business at hand. ‘Sabotage isn’t going to win the war,’ he said, ‘but intelligence will.’ Dansey’s hostility towards SOE was built on sound MI6 logic. Apart from the ludicrous situation of two organizations both having their own separate networks of agents, side by side in occupied territory, with the threat that one might inadvertently give the other away, there was the insurmountable problem that their separate objectives were mutually incompatible. SOE was charged with the job of establishing and training secret armies able to rise up on command from London, to blow up power stations, derail trains or create road blocks. MI6’s objective was to establish networks of anonymous individuals who could supply, down a reliable line of communication, information about enemy activity, or planned activity. The best lubricant for intelligence work was absolute silence. The prospect of another secret network in the area, blowing up bridges in the middle of a well-planned intelligence operation, sent shivers down Dansey’s spine. More importantly, SOE was a rival for precious resources, both human
and material. Radio sets, weapons, aircraft, cash – and personnel. Both organizations were recruiting from the same groups of people with, broadly speaking, the same qualifications. But for Dansey it was more than just another service to compete with for valuable resources, it was a personal challenge to his monopoly, it was a rival empire.

Nevertheless, at the beginning, the relationship between SOE and Dansey was a cordial one, essentially because it was largely on Dansey’s own terms. He demanded, and was given, an office at SOE headquarters in Baker Street, and as recruits began turning up to fill key positions in the field he insisted on interviewing each one personally.
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Even given that SOE were starting from nowhere, Dansey took some strong proprietorial liberties with the fledgling secret service.

At these interviews he made it clear what he was going to allow the would-be agents to do. J. G. Beevor, who was sent to neutral Portugal, recalls how he was instructed, ‘to make contact with the MI6 man in Lisbon, and liaise with him before I did any recruiting’.
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As SOE began establishing networks in the occupied countries, it was made abundantly clear that no action of a paramilitary nature should be taken without clearing it first with MI6. In short, Dansey wanted SOE to ‘do nothing’. The principle of ‘No bangs without Foreign Office [MI6] say-so’ was maintained for more than a year. But Dansey knew it couldn’t and wouldn’t last. As SOE developed, it naturally began to see things from its own perspective, and inevitably the relationship with Dansey became soured. He would refer to them as ‘those amateurs’ or ‘the boys from Baker Street’, and when SOE expanded its establishment in Britain, acquiring a number of old country properties in which they housed training schools,
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Dansey re-christened SOE the ‘Stately ’Omes of England’.
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Dansey knew that SOE’s growing independence would make his enquiries into their operations more intrusive, so
he ensured from the outset that he would be able to get ‘intelligence’ about their activities from other sources. Apart from Sir Frank Nelson, the head of SOE, who was always very amenable, and a clutch of other ‘MI6 spies’, the surest form of intelligence Dansey ever received came from SOE’s ‘signals’. As their networks expanded they naturally required wireless communications. Dansey argued successfully that SOE should use MI6’s communications networks, which were already proven to be secure. From the beginning, right up until the spring of 1942, Claude Dansey received a copy of every single message, incoming or outgoing, to every single SOE radio operator in the field.
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There wasn’t a thing SOE were doing that Dansey didn’t know about.

Put in perspective, the creation of SOE during the summer of 1940 was really no more than an unwelcome irritant for Dansey, at a time when his entire empire was virtually crumbling before him. From May until the French armistice, the storm that had swept through Western Europe also swept MI6’s networks from the scene. Their original battle plan was to operate a number of networks from forward centres in Paris and Switzerland, which would collate and digest the raw intelligence before passing it on to London and the British Military Command in Europe. The Blitzkrieg came as such a shock that Dansey’s networks were all over-run, communications were cut, contingency plans were dropped on a daily basis and one by one station chiefs and their staff made their way back to Britain.

As soon as it was possible to see the situation clearly, it was obvious to all the military planners that if and when a return to Europe was possible, it would be through France. For MI6 the situation in France was not good – but not hopeless. There were some whispers of information getting through, initially from the Americans. Britain had established an unofficial intelligence exchange with the United States in 1939 and by May 1940 a formal link was
forged and William Stephenson, one of Dansey’s Z men since 1936, became the official liaison officer in New York.

Following the armistice, the Americans, who were in principle still neutral, moved their consular headquarters from Paris down to Vichy, where the US Ambassador, Admiral Leahy, established a strong relationship with Pétain. The American ‘intelligence service’ as such barely existed. There was the Central Office of Information (later known as the OSS), which in May 1940 was very much a proto-intelligence service, with no networks and a skeleton staff of untrained agents. Such intelligence as was gathered was of a piecemeal nature from informal contacts made by their staff in Vichy and Marseilles.

MI6’s other source in France was through their traditional links with the Deuxième Bureau, which despite the occupation maintained contact with London. Unfortunately, the Deuxième Bureau was not well spread in the northern occupied zone. But a real gift for Dansey came in the way of a self-made Polish network created by two Military Intelligence officers, Captain Roman Czerniawski and Colonel Vincent Zarembski. These two men, one in Paris, the other in Toulouse, linked up to create a network that stretched from Marseilles, across France and deep into the occupied zone. The network, known as INTERALLIÉ, made formal links with the exiled Polish court in London, in November 1940. Dansey came to an understanding with the Poles that INTERALLIÉ should work directly to him, and by January 1941 that link was formally made. Dansey had a network in France.

A problem that quickly became apparent once France had fallen was the growing number of British servicemen trapped behind enemy lines. This led to the creation of another network. An escape and evasion service, called MI9, was set up to operate secret routes out of occupied Europe for British personnel. Claude Dansey was not going to allow the situation that had occurred with SOE to
be repeated with MI9. A great deal of MI9’s traffic was going to pass through Vichy France, which ideally meant Marseilles. Dansey had the contacts and the resources to set up a top-level escape service from Marseilles, which he offered to do and then put it at MI9’s disposal. In return, MI9 had to accept Dansey’s remote control, which he effected through his representative, the ex-Coldstream Guardsman James Langley. This arrangement had two distinct advantages for Dansey. First, it ensured he enjoyed full control over another of those wartime secret services; second, it gave him a good reliable service through which he could transport his own agents out of occupied Europe. It also provided him with another source of intelligence, albeit fairly raw intelligence. Everyone on his escape line would pass through his people along the way and so cut out the sometimes endless wait at the reception centres in Britain. He sent out Donald Darling (codenamed SUNDAY) to set up the escape lines.

Darling eventually made his headquarters at the MI6 station in Gibraltar and would be Dansey’s filter through which all escapees had to pass. The next link in the chain would be James Langley (MONDAY) – and then Dansey himself. The man on the spot in Marseilles who actually got the line going was Ian Garrow, and when he was captured it passed to a remarkable Belgian military physician named Dr Albert Guerisse. He chose the codename ‘Pat O’Leary’, and in due course the Marseilles escape service became known as the ‘Pat Line’.
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During that hectic summer of 1940, Bodington was wasting his days at Electra House with the Political Intelligence Department, what had become the Subversion branch of SOE. At this stage of the war, Bodington was composing uplifting messages for the French population, fabricating stories about the invincibility of the British and the corruption of the Germans, later dropped as leaflets over France. It wasn’t his scene, it was too much like working for Reuters. In July 1940, after a long and tedious
process of string-pulling, Bodington succeeded in getting another interview with MI6.