Churchill's Wizards (28 page)

The MoI was meant to distribute news on behalf of all Government departments and the three fighting services, but this information policy (open doors and windows) conflicted with its second responsibility, which was censorship (close all doors and windows). It was possibly deformed by the secrecy of its gestation for future wartime needs, in late 1935, under the auspices of a standing subcommittee of the Committee for Imperial Defence. The MoI was meant to be in the public relations business, and its first director was intended to be Sir Stephen Tallents, the imaginative civil servant who wrote
The
Projection of England
, a pamphlet that led to the founding of the British Council. But the appointment did not happen, as Tallents was replaced by Macmillan, and the ill-favoured MoI that shambled into the light looked askance at news or publicity. Fierce ‘D' Notices were slapped on newspapers; the BBC was restricted. After four months, Macmillan was replaced by Sir John Reith, formerly of the BBC and Imperial Airways. In the MoI he found a lawyer running censorship, a man who saw his job as interpreting the regulations rabbinically rather than trying to woo a little more news from the Armed Services than they wanted to give. ‘Also he thought an event wasn't news till the press got it!' John Reith wrote in his diary. ‘Weird and infuriating. Save us from lawyers.' The Home Publicity Division of the Ministry attempted to boost morale, but failed. Its first poster, reading ‘
Your
courage,
your
cheerfulness,
your
resolution will bring
us
Victory' soon had cynical and disaffected members of the public asking who exactly ‘you' and ‘we' were in this equation.

The MoI was not responsible for the propaganda leaflets or ‘bomphs' that showered over Germany at the start of the war. These were produced by a shadowy organisation in London called Department EH, whose letters stood for Electra House, a large
building on Victoria Embankment where the chairman of the Imperial Communications Advisory Board had his office. He was the very same Sir Campbell Stuart who had run Crewe House in WW1 and who had been invited to do the same job of Propaganda to Enemy Countries during 1938. Department EH's first job, at the height of the Munich crisis, was to help get German translations of speeches by Chamberlain, Daladier and Roosevelt rapidly broadcast on the powerful commercial station, Radio Luxembourg, which was close to Germany and audible by many there. This was a delicate matter. The BBC itself was actually trying to get Luxembourg closed down as a ‘pirate' station because so many British listeners preferred its light music to BBC fare, so the corporation was not best pleased when its staff and facilities at Broadcasting House were hurriedly used by the British government to assist a rival broadcaster.

The head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, is traditionally referred to as ‘C' after the initial letter of the surname of its first head in 1911, Mansfield Cumming. Before the war, SIS's reputation was probably a lot higher in spy fiction than it was in reality. Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair liked secrecy, and being the only one ‘in the know', for security reasons. Most SIS officers then operated abroad as Passport Control Officers in British embassies and consulates, but in late 1936, aware that this was well known to UK's enemies, Sinclair had secretly established an alternative organisation, the ‘Z' network, to gather intelligence from Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent from Fascist Italy. ‘Z' was run by Claude Dansey, and the cover story for the end of his career in the Secret Service was the plausible rumour that he had been sacked for dipping his hand in the till in Rome. Nobody else in SIS apart from Admiral Sinclair knew about ‘Z', which operated from a suite on the eighth floor of the north-west wing of Bush House and used adjoining companies – Geoffrey Duveen & Co, Joel Brothers Diamond Company – as a front.

In March 1938 Sinclair had also asked Major Lawrence Grand, RE to look at the possibilities of creating a British organisation for covert offensive activities, looking at ‘every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military forces'. Grand was promoted to colonel and set up the Devices or Destruction Section
of MI6 – Section D – with the innocuous camouflage name of the Statistical Research Department of the War Office, and he began establishing a network of agents in cities abroad, especially in the Balkans. He started studying undercover sabotage, the training of saboteurs and methods of countering sabotage, as well as producing and experimenting with ammunition and explosives. Secret services are supposed to keep quiet about what they do, but Section D was bound to produce a lot of noise, which conflicted with that. Section D, moreover, saw destructive sabotage against potential enemies as not just physical, but also moral, mental, and verbal. But these were also in the spheres of propaganda and radio, which brought in EH, the Overseas Department of the Ministry of Information, and MI7 in the War Office, leaving plenty of room for confusion and muddle.

From March 1939, Sinclair's Secret Service money was also paying for a small War Office Military Intelligence Research unit called MI (R), headed by a fiery, chain-smoking Royal Engineer called Colonel J. C. F. Holland. Jo Holland was already immersed in the study of guerrilla warfare, and wrote a joint paper with Grand in March 1939 on possible guerrilla operations against Germany. MI (R)'s brief was to keep studying unconventional warfare for the uniformed services, to draw up a Field Service Regulations Handbook for guerrillas and organised irregular bands, and to investigate any destructive devices that could be produced to help them. Holland appointed two grade II staff officers to assist him. Major Colin Gubbins of the Royal Artillery researched and wrote two pamphlets,
The Partisan Leader's Handbook
(‘Surprise is the most important thing in everything you undertake') and, with Holland,
The Art of
Guerrilla Warfare
, which looked particularly at T. E. Lawrence in WW1, the IRA, the Arab rebellion in Palestine and the North-West Frontier of India. The other grade II officer Colonel Holland appointed, a bang-happy sapper called Major Millis Jefferis, who later invented the ‘sticky bomb', wrote
How To Use High Explosives
. (‘If distributed today,' Patrick Howarth remarked in his book,
Undercover
, in 1980, ‘they would probably be described as terrorists' handbooks.'). MI (R) also headhunted especially adventurous types from among the linguists, explorers, writers and executives already earmarked by the director of military intelligence. After being interviewed by Major Gerald Templer of military intelligence in War
Office room 365, they would be sent in plain clothes to Cambridge for a course (later informally known as ‘The Gauleiters') whose lectures covered guerrilla warfare, resistance, sabotage, subversion and clandestine wireless communication.

Sinclair had been ‘C' since 1923, but he did not just control the spies who gathered human intelligence (HUMINT). He was also the director of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS), which dealt in the signals intelligence (SIGINT) that became so vital to victory in WW2. Sinclair himself had formed the School in 1919, when he was still the director of Naval Intelligence, by combining the remnants of Room 40 at the Admiralty with the War Office's equivalent. The school – its name was a camouflage; it taught nothing – was under the nominal control of the Foreign Office, and stingily paid for out of the Foreign Office vote. GC&CS continued wartime signals intelligence in peacetime by intercepting and interpreting the cable and wireless communications of both hostile and friendly powers. Much material was received under the 1920 Official Secrets Act that Sinclair had helped to frame, whereby all cable companies operating in Britain were legally obliged to hand over copies of all telegrams sent or received within ten days. There was also a chain of radio intercept or ‘Y' stations in key points at home and abroad. During the 1920s, when Bolshevik subversion was seen as the great threat, GC&CS, under its deputy director Alastair Denniston, had decrypted all the codes and ciphers of Soviet Russia. Unfortunately, British politicians in Stanley Baldwin's government in 1927 could not resist publicly boasting about this covertly acquired information. The Soviets then began sending their diplomatic and commercial wireless traffic using ‘one time pads', which were impenetrable. This disastrous loss of intelligence taught a hard lesson about secrecy which was not forgotten in WW2: never let your enemy know what you know, or how you know it.

Denniston was a little Scot who had husbanded the section through lean times. There were only sixty-six staff in 1919; in 1935, there were still no more than 104 on the payroll. Two years later, Admiral Sinclair told Denniston to start earmarking and recruiting more ‘men of the professor type' from universities who would be ready to start cryptanalysis when war broke out. In that eventuality, the GC&CS would move fifty miles from Broadway Buildings in London to a large
ugly mansion that SIS had purchased in 1938 in Buckinghamshire, a house called Bletchley Park. Among the 12,000 men and women who eventually worked at what was known as ‘Station X' were eccentric geniuses, including an untidy young Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, called Alan M. Turing, often described as the founder of modern computer science. His work led to the building of the world's first programmable digital computer, Colossus, which helped break German top-secret codes and produced the top grade of special intelligence known as
ULTRA
.

When the German Navy appeared in the Mediterranean in 1936, giving military support to General Franco's insurgent forces during the Spanish Civil War, they were signalling in cryptograms that the British could not read, communicating through Enigma electromechanical enciphering machines that looked like a typewriter in a wooden box, complicated by variable plugs and rotor wheels. In 1937, GC&CS were analysing the traffic, without understanding the messages, of the German air, army and police forces who were also using Enigma ciphers. As war approached in 1939, the Polish cipher bureau contacted its British and French counterparts and asked them to visit. On 24 July 1939, a month before Clare Hollingworth made the same journey, Alastair Denniston, with two GC&CS colleagues, Alfred Knox and Humphrey Sandwith, flew from Hendon to Warsaw. The next day they were driven to Pyry, a village in woods south of Warsaw, and shown into a room with lumpy objects on a table covered by a sheet. Their Polish hosts then uncovered their
pièces de
résistance
: three Enigma machines that they had built themselves, with the rotors correctly wired in the German way. The French and the British were given one each for further technical research, to be shipped via Paris.

The British Enigma machine reached Victoria Station on the ‘Golden Arrow' boat-train late on 16 August 1939, in a large diplomatic bag, camouflaged by the mountainous luggage of the singer Sacha Guitry and his wife. It was met on the platform by Sinclair's deputy, Colonel Stewart Menzies, wearing black tie for an evening engagement, with the
Légion d'honneur
rosette in his buttonhole. Three months later, a fortnight after Sinclair's death, Menzies was anointed ‘C', given the secret ivory emblem of his office by King George VI, and became the keeper of the golden eggs of
ULTRA
.

SIGINT saved SIS from the disasters of their HUMINT. On 9 November 1939, two SIS agents were captured at Venlo on the German–Dutch border. Major Richard Stevens, a passport control officer, and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, a monocled cove working for the ‘Z' network, had believed they were going to recruit an anti-Nazi dissident, a ‘good German' high up in the Luftwaffe who was leading the resistance to Hitler. In fact the whole thing was a deception operation by German counter-espionage,
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
IVE
, an elaborate sting to roll up all the British intelligence networks in Holland. Among the thugs who captured them was the same Alfred Naujocks who had led the fake raid on Gleiwitz radio station by the Polish border at the very start of the war. For this new trick, Hitler personally gave Naujocks the Iron Cross. Under interrogation, Stevens and Best told everything. Much of their information about the British secret services went into a Gestapo publication called
Informations
-
heft GroßBrittanien
, prepared by SS Major General Walter Schellenberg as the invasion handbook for the Nazi forces who would assault, occupy and purge the United Kingdom of Great Britain after Göring's air force dominated the skies.

In the summer of 1939, Arthur Watts, the president of the Radio Society of Great Britain, was approached by the War Office to find amateur radio enthusiasts prepared to listen for clandestine enemy morse code signals on short wavebands. Thousands of ‘radio hams' became part-time V. I. s or Voluntary Interceptors, organised by groups and sectors into the Radio Security Service (RSS), one of the nine wartime secret services. They found no spies transmitting in England, but they did pick up weak Morse signals from Europe that came in coded groups. They turned out to be wireless messages directed to German secret service agents abroad. In its new headquarters at Arkley View, North Barnet, the RSS – which included Oxford dons like Hugh Trevor-Roper, Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle – collated and classified the intercept logs, before passing the messages on to Bletchley Park for deciphering. This ability to read German intelligence messages was crucial to later deception operations and to the ‘Double Cross' system.

The connection between double agents and radio began before the war, with a character code-named snow, who in real life was a Welsh electrical engineer called Arthur Owens. Owens first contacted the
Abwehr, the Wehrmacht intelligence service, in Germany in 1936, and they later gave him a wireless transmitter set. Owens thus became one of only six known German spies in Britain. But he also reported what he had done to the British authorities. At the outbreak of war Arthur Owens ended up in Wandsworth Prison in the custody of the Security Service, the British secret service which does counter-espionage and is also known as MI5. Owens pleaded with Major T. A. ‘Tar' Robertson of ‘B' Division, MI5, to be allowed to radio supervised messages back to Hamburg. This began in September 1939, but snow at first sent mainly weather reports.