Nothing should be as favourably regarded as intelligence;
nothing should be as generously rewarded as intelligence;
nothing should be as confidential as the work of intelligence
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 4th Century BC
The defeated British Expeditionary Force had been poorly-equipped and ineffectively trained, had been outnumbered and had lacked effective intelligence and had been defeated by a formidable war machine using combined operations techniques. General Sir Archibald Wavell, who had been the second Commandant of the Intelligence Corps in 1914, and was now commanding Middle East Command, commented:
British military authorities have seldom realized that an Intelligence System cannot be improvised and requires to be built up over a period of years.
Already thirty-one FSP sections had served in France, however, the demand for interpreters meant that about 50 per cent of the first ten sections to arrive had been cross-posted to form the nucleus of new units. Three had been killed and twelve captured. One Member of the British Empire honour, two Distinguished Conduct Medals, five Military Medals, the latter all to 21 FSP, and one Mentioned in Despatch were awarded. The intelligence officers who made it back to Great Britain received valuable operational experience. Major Arnold Ridley was evacuated with a nervous breakdown and was reprimanded for not disclosing his First World War wounds and the impact of his experiences.
Having outgrown its accommodation at Mytchett, in May the Field Security Wing moved to the former Senior Officers’ School at Sheerness, where it was known as the Field Security Centre and Depot, with Lieutenant Colonel Davis appointed as Commandant. Under his command was the Other Ranks Training Wing, His instructors included the newly commissioned Lieutenant Muggeridge. June was a busy month as the FSP sections refitted while others were formed and posted to meet worldwide deployments. But Sheerness soon proved inadequate and with invasion perceived to be imminent, Davis requisitioned the ecclesiastical seminary of King Alfred’s College, Winchester and St Grimbald’s Girls’ School next door as the Intelligence Corps Depot and Training Centre. The lack of a drill square was solved by using one in the neighbouring Green Jackets’ barracks.
One morning, Lieutenant Colonel Percival, a colleague of Templer, telephoned Davis and asked if he was attending a conference. When Davis replied he knew nothing about it Percival then said that the agenda focused on the establishment of an Intelligence Corps; Davis had his driving licence endorsed for speeding on his way to London. The conference went well except that his application for a Regimental Sergeant Major was postponed until the Corps establishment reached three. As the demand for intelligence grew, Majors Strong and William Jeffries, then both at MI1 (Administration), convinced Brigadier K.J. Martin, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, and Major General Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt (late Grenadier Guards), the Director, that the intelligence and security functions could not be met by inadequately-trained intelligence officers and soldiers formed into an ad hoc Corps. Major General Beaumont-Nesbitt and Major Jeffries then suggested to Secretary of State for War, Oliver Stanley, that the Royal Holloway College in Virginia Water was a suitable Intelligence Corps, Headquarters, Stanley replied, ‘We cannot interfere with women’s education’. Jeffries then suggested Oxford University but was advised that while official support was unlikely, a private agreement would be acceptable. By chance, Captain John Russell, a former Oxford Union President (later Professor Sir John Russell), was working at MI1 (X) and so Jeffries instructed him to use his influence and not to return to London until he had obtained a headquarters. Russell returned five days later having secured Pembroke College for the Commandant and Oriel College as the Headquarters and Officers’ Wing. Russell was later part of the entourage when the Duke of Windsor sailed to Bermuda.
A note sent to King George VI by the War Office seeking authority to establish the Intelligence Corps was ratified in Army Order No. 112 dated 15 July and followed four days later by Army Council Instruction No. 1020/1940 authorizing its fixture in the British Army, an event that is celebrated annually as Corps Day on the weekend nearest to 19 July. MI1 (X) remained the sponsor branch at the Directorate of Military Intelligence. On 25 July, the King accepted the recommendation of the new Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, that the Corps cap badge should be a double Tudor Rose flanked by laurel leaves, signifying victory, resting on a scroll inscribed ‘Intelligence Corps’, with the display surmounted by the Crown, signifying loyalty. In heraldic terms, the rose signifying secrecy originates from the myth of Cupid bribing Adonis with a rose to prevent him divulging his amorous relationship with Venus. From this fable emerged the practice of roses suspended over banquet tables to remind guests of the necessity for discretion, hence the term sub rosa. The first to be photographed wearing their badges were Davis and Regimental Sergeant Major William Smith, the first Corps Regimental Sergeant Major, and Corporal Monro fittingly in civilian clothes. Most officers and other ranks in intelligence appointments and units were transferred under the Army Council Instruction. Some, following the traditional view that intelligence was a wartime necessity, rejected transfer in case it affected their careers.
The reason for the adoption of green, grey and a thin red stripe as the Corps colours seems to have been submerged in the fog of history. July 1940 was a period of intense national anxiety and just how much time and debate was spent at the War Office in deciding the colours the new Corps to be green, grey and red is not known, however, they bear a close similarity to the ribbon of the Indian General Service Medal 1936 to 1939. Perhaps, in a period when there were more important issues, someone in the War Office remembered that the Corps had adopted green in 1916. In any event, cypress (or sage) green traditionally signifies intelligence. One account of its origins dates to the 1857 Indian Mutiny when a British intelligence officer disguised as a native in a loincloth passed through mutineer lines to bring news of the relieving columns to the defenders of Lucknow Residency. To avoid embarrassing the ladies, a wife arranged for a suit to be made for him using the green baize from a billiard table. The secondary colour of grey possibly originates from the first attempt to dye white uniforms into khaki. The scarlet stripe introduced into the Corps tie in 1949 and Stable Belt in 1957 is said to record either its association with 10th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, Intelligence (B) during the First World War or acknowledges the link with the Corps of Military Police. Entry into the Intelligence Corps is signified by wearing the green lanyard, which first appeared for officers in about 1942 and was rolled out to other ranks after 1945. The Corps Quick March The Rose and Laurel, written at the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall was approved in 1953 by the Colonel Commandant, Major General Francis Davidson CB DSO MC, after he had noted at three passing-out parades at Eaton Hall Officer Cadet Training Unit commanded by Intelligence Corps Senior Under-Officers that they marched to British Grenadiers. It is based on Let Bucks a’Hunting Go and Sly Renard. The motto Manui Dat Cognito Vires (Knowledge Gives Strength to the Arm) was approved by Queen Elizabeth II in 1964 after being submitted by the third Colonel Commandant, Major General A.C. Shortt CB OBE, from a draft by the Eton College teacher, Mr B.G. Whitfield. The Slow March, Purcell’s Trumpet Tune, scored by the Director of Music at Kneller Hall, and Collect, written by the Reverend B.W. Howarth CF, were both approved in 1971. The first Colonel Commandant was General Sir Bernard Paget MC (late Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry) when he was Commander, GHQ Home Forces in 1943. He had commanded with the withdrawal from Åndalsnes in Norway.
During the summer, Lieutenant Colonel Robbins established the Military Intelligence School at Swanage to train intelligence officers. In October it was renamed the Intelligence Training Centre with Lieutenant Colonel Karl Barker-Benfield DSO MC (late Royal Artillery) appointed as Commandant; he later became Inspector of Intelligence Training. Towards the end of 1940, the Centre emerged as two components. The Special Military Intelligence Wing at Smedley’s Hydro, Matlock ran five week Intelligence courses for divisional and brigade intelligence officers, photographic interpreters and Defence Security. In December, the newly promoted Colonel Jeffries, as the first Commandant, moved into Pembroke College with five officers and formally formed the Intelligence Corps with Lieutenant Colonel Davis appointed Assistant Commandant, Chief Instructor and Officer Commanding, the Depot. At Oriel, Major Squire Duff-Taylor MC (Royal Scots Fusiliers) formed the Officers Wing. In January 1941, the HQ Intelligence Corps and Depot establishment was a full colonel, a lieutenant colonel, four majors, sixteen captains, four lieutenants, a Quartermaster and 275 other ranks. The Depot establishment of twenty-seven officers, ten warrant officers, thirty-five SNCOs and 229 JNCOs and privates, mostly Intelligence Corps, was structured to process 100 officers and 450 other ranks. The title of Field Security Personnel, which had been changed from Field Security Police when the Corps was formed, still suggested law enforcement and was later altered to ‘Field Security’ (FS).
With the need to form the new Corps, the application of the 1922 Manual of Military Intelligence recruitment principles led to an interesting mixture. MI1 (X) trawled potential intelligence officers from Officer Cadet Training Units and notifications from Depots. Several were commissioned from the other ranks, including thirty-seven who had been in France. This set a tradition of a large number of officers being commissioned from the ranks. Other ranks, particularly those with languages a priority, were talent-spotted at the Corps of Military Police Recruiting Office, Trafalgar Square, London and at Depots and training regiments. Bearing in mind that almost everyone selected to join the Corps had served with a basic training unit, the Depot training schedule reflected the nature of the Corps. The basic training company reinforced the military skills of drill, map reading, fieldcraft, weapon training and tactics. Another company taught motor cycle riding. The third company concentrated on Defence Security at the School of Military Intelligence while the fourth company administered men on notice of postings and casualties. Determined to knock the other ranks into soldiers were Guards Division instructors. Company Sergeant Major Drakely seems to have had a reputation of being in a state of permanent fury. When the avant-garde composer, Private Humphrey Searle, transferred from the Gloucesters in 1940, he found the discipline to be more strict. David Engleheart recalls:
Tough and often unfair it was, but the majority of us were having to mix with the ‘brutal, licentious soldiery’ and find ourselves advisers to brigade and regimental commanders. The British Army has always had its expertise on the cheap. There was a deep suspicion among the regular officers of the ‘Pansy Resting on its Laurels’. To be able to demonstrate a smart, soldierly bearing… before one revealed the simple arts of intelligence was the best possible introduction to the inevitably more senior and experienced officers to whom we had to report. So no disrespect to the Depot staff, with its band of gentle dug out officers and supernatural guardsmen
Between December 1941 and October 1945, Brigadier J.W. Jervois MC (Northamptons) was Inspector of Intelligence Training and Commandant for the Special Military Intelligence Wing, which became a model for overseas Intelligence Schools and Depots and the Control Commission School for Occupied Germany, Austria and Italy after 1945.
While the Army moved into defensive positions, the RAF defended the skies and the Royal Navy patrolled the North Sea and English Channel. Guarding the Nation’s gates were Home and Port Security and Field Security sections supported by MI5 Port Control Officers, Security Control Officers so that every port, harbour and airport was covered. The Port Security Mobile Unit provided reinforcements and an audit role. By early 1941, fifty Home Port Security sections, numbered in the 100 Series, had been raised, however their unit histories are sparse. The greatest number of decorated soldiers were in 115 HPSS – a Distinguished Conduct Medal, three MMs and a Meritorious Service Medal. Company Sergeant Major V.C.L. Evans, MC, Croix de Guerre (Belgium), aged 60 years and a former First World War Major, owned a shipping company. In September 1939, 119 HPSS was raised from former employees of Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight, Birkenhead. The designations of others reflected collectively their responsibilities, for example, ‘HPSS Bristol Channel Ports’ and ‘HPSS Clyde Control’. Covering the points and airports efficiently relied on effective working relationships with Customs and Excise, the Royal Navy, Merchant Navy and shipping and airline agents. All vessels entering British waters in convoys, flying flags of convenience and neutrality, hospital ships and fast liners making lone dashes were vetted by Port Security Section detachments of, usually, a sergeant and three corporals/lance corporals. Particular attention was paid to ships and aircraft arriving from Ireland, Portugal and South America and to seamen who had signed on in neutral ports. Inevitably, there were accusations of undue delay. A detailed register of merchant seamen was developed. by MI5. Its Central Security War Black List was also collated from a variety of sources, including refugees and lists maintained by governments-in-exile. Anyone proving to be a problem was transferred to Immigration. After Dunkirk, FSS were also deployed on Port Security duties. Generally more than one would cover large ports while smaller harbours were monitored by deploying detachments controlled from a section headquarters in a larger port.
After graduating from Sheerness, Lance Corporal Charles Crisp joined 46 FSP in Plymouth in June. It had been formed in June from NCOs evacuated from Dunkirk and newly-recruited soldiers and had detachments at Torquay, Brixham, Salcombe and Dartmouth. Plymouth Sound was a disembarkation port for the two Polish divisions evacuated from France before they were sent to camps for counter-intelligence screening. British and foreign arrivals were bewildered by the quarantining of their pets. One Italian lady left France as a neutral and arrived as an enemy alien. Soon after Crisp arrived, he and another lance corporal were given a revolver, but no ammunition, and struggled up the rope ladder of a freighter to be told by the captain that he had just quelled a mutiny among his Chinese crew. Corporal Edward Canon, who was serving with 142 HPSS in Torquay, and his wife and two children were killed in an air raid in May 1944.
When, in January 1941, Lieutenant Colonel Davis was posted to a logistics appointment in HQ 5th Division, Lieutenant Colonel W.H. Brooks (South Lancashires), who had been Chief Instructor and Depot Commander, was appointed Assistant Commandant. Davis had played a significant role in the evolution of the Corps by developing Defence Security and organizing the moves from Mytchett to Sheerness to Winchester but his contribution to forming the Corps and preparing for war is largely unrecognized. By the time the Depot moved to Winchester, fifty-five officers and 715 other ranks had been formed into sixty Field Security sections. By the time he left, a further seventy-seven had been formed, giving a total of 137 sections with sixty-three in the Field Force, nine supporting Home Commands and fifty distributed among ports and airports in Great Britain. Thirteen were in the Middle East and two in East Africa.
At the War Office, the Directorate of Military Intelligence expanded to meet the global nature of the war by forming subsidiaries in all overseas Commands. Its eight departments in 1939 had increased to nineteen by 1942 with the Intelligence Corps widely represented to meet the burgeoning demand for intelligence and security. The Directorate consisted of:
The Director of Military Intelligence from 1940 to 1944 was Major General Francis Davidson. Commissioned into the Royal Artillery during the First World War, he had fought in France and Gallipoli and in 1939 had been the British Expeditionary Force Commander, Royal Artillery. He was a firm believer in the need for the Intelligence Corps and was Colonel Commandant between 1952 and 1960.
The principal Field Security opponent in Europe was the Abwehr. The Allies had demanded in 1918 that German intelligence must be defensive, however, by February 1938, the Foreign Affairs and Defence Office of the Armed Forces High Command (Amt Ausland und Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) emerged with a principally Human Intelligence remit. Generally known as the Abwehr, it was commanded by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris until he and several other officers were arrested after being implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Major Nikolaus Ritter controlled a small Luftwaffe unit that infiltrated agents into Great Britain, however so effective was the counter-intelligence that most agents were welcomed by MI 5 reception parties. The Abwehr was later absorbed into the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheithauptamt) or RHSA. Its counter-intelligence function was controlled by Reinhardt Heydrich until it was transferred to Ernst Kaltenbrunner after Heydrich was assassinated in 1942. Consisting of seven departments that included internal and external police intelligence and the criminal police, most feared was the Political Secret Police (Geheime Staats Polizei) commonly known as the Gestapo. Closely allied to the Gestapo was the Nazi Party intelligence organization, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD.
While the cryptographic organization at Bletchley Park provided strategic information to add to the overall intelligence picture, MI8 (Signals Intelligence) sponsored Special Wireless units intercepting and analyzing enemy battlefield communications traffic. Captured code books and cipher documents and the interrogation of signallers often helped targeting. When, in 1939, the three Service Directors of Intelligence believed that their Y Services should remain under their respective controls and that crypto-analysis should be centralized at Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cipher School disagreed. Within three months, however, the regular decoding tactical Enigma traffic led to the School recognizing the value of the Y Services. The principal Army intercept platform was at Fort Bridgeworks, Chatham until it was bombed in 1941 and was moved to RAF Chicksands Priory – the first time that the Corps was associated with its current Headquarters. However, Chicksands proved unpopular and in March 1941, as No. 6 Intelligence School, it moved to Beaumanor Hall, Quorn. The eventual centralization of the Y Services at Bletchley led, in 1942, to several Intelligence Corps at Beaumanor being told they had joined a branch of MI8 known as The Central Party and were to analyze German military communications. In June, the Central Party moved to Bletchley Park where Captains Edward Crankshaw and James Blair-Cunynghame played a significant role in its development, so that by 1943 it had become a large organization collecting detailed knowledge of German wireless networks, all without a decoding room.
About 850 Intelligence Corps are thought to have served at Bletchley Park. The 910 women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service attached to the Corps provided clerks, draughtswomen, cipher operators and intercept analysts. Staff Sergeant Elaine Deacon arrived in January 1943 and was employed in the Direction Finding Unit. Billeted in Fenny Stratford, she was among the hundreds using the enormous canteen where famous artists, actors, composer, newsreaders and unknown scientists and academics mingled with sailors, soldiers and airmen. Bletchley Park eventually became overcrowded and the uniformed elements were moved to the neighbouring Shenley Road Military Camp where the women were accommodated in large huts fitted with stoves belching acrid smoke. Some found the conditions so deplorable that they slept outside on their groundsheets under a gas cape. Deacon described the change as ‘Far from being privileged people selected for our “special qualifications”, we became literally part-time prisoners of war’.
The observations of captured British servicemen collated by the Directorate of Military Intelligence during the First World War proved a very useful source of information on such matters as the effects of bombing, unit locations and civilian morale. MI9 (British Prisoners), originally No. 9 Intelligence School, was formed in December 1939 to collect information and facilitate escape and evasion by supplying equipment, such as silk maps and mini compasses in Red Cross parcels sent to prison camps. Codes were taught to selected servicemen, the majority being aircrew, and as early as November 1940, the first messages were being passed. Eventually virtually every German and Italian prison camp had prisoners passing encrypted information in letters to notional friends – in fact MI9. Prison camp security officers often had difficulty in breaking the codes.
The board games manufacturer, John Waddington Ltd, played an important role by printing and concealing maps printed on silk and compasses in the game pieces and inserting currency among Monopoly money. Games with smuggled goods were identified by a dot in the Free Parking square. It is estimated that more than a third of the 35,000 Allied who either escaped from camps or evaded capture, profited from the ingenuity of Waddington’s. To avoid compromising Red Cross parcels, games were sent as parcels from families.
When Quartermaster Sergeant John Brown (Royal Artillery) was captured at Dunkirk and transferred to the comfortable Stalag IIID near Berlin, it had become a source of recruits for the SS Legion of St George, also known as the British Free Corps, then being raised by John Amery, a naïve member of an establishment family who had remained in Vichy France after 1940. Placed in charge of prisoner administration and convincing the Germans that he sympathized with Amery, Brown was given substantial freedom that allowed him to collect information on German air defences and the location of an underground tank factory in the Berlin area. When Margery Booth, an English opera singer from Wigan married to a German and who achieved fame with the Berlin State Opera, gave several performances at the camp, Brown realized that she was loyal and used her as a letter box to send information to MI9. She was eventually arrested but escaped from prison. Her courage was not recognized for many years. She died, aged 47 years, in the United States. Letters to prisoners held in Japanese prison camps were so precious that MI9 was hardly involved except to facilitate escapes. Captain Derek Hooper, a Chinese speaker who joined the British Army Aid Group, a MI 9 sub-unit in China, was involved in organizing the escapes and evasions of about 1,880 Allied servicemen and collected intelligence, primarily from Hong Kong. Other Intelligence Corps members of the Group were Sergeant Ronald Yao Pang and Jemadars Nazar Hussein and Khushi Mohammed of Intelligence Corps (India).
The interception and censorship of correspondence to prevent military, social and economic intelligence inadvertently or deliberately falling into enemy hands is a centuries-old counter-intelligence practice. Moral issues about denying the correspondents’ privacy is countered by the need to protect national and operational secrecy. MI12 (Censorship) played a crucial role in organizing the interception of parcels, letters, telegrams and post cards, particularly those purporting to be between pen pal exchanges. Letters written by Service personnel were censored at unit level.
The Intelligence Corps provided linguists and analysts at Base and forward censor sections, Code sections, Special Mails Sections in operational theatres and at Allied prison camps. Sometimes suspect correspondence was discreetly inspected in order not to compromise counter-intelligence investigations. A host of codes were encountered from the simple marking of letters with tiny dots to the complexities of inserting codes. Messages concealed by German prisoners in which the encryption was governed by the regular sequence of letters were relatively easy to crack because the language word order is absolute and therefore deviations are quickly apparent. Occasionally, letters written in Braille would turn up. The last time that censorship at unit level is thought to have taken place was for a few days at Ascension Island during the 1982 Falklands Campaign.
In 1940, MI14 (Germany), commanded by Strong, now a lieutenant colonel, collated sufficient details on the deployments, organizations, personalities, uniforms and insignia and operational philosophies of the German ground forces, including the SS, and their allies to print two publications that were circulated to unit level:
The Order of Battle of the German Army – The Yellow Book The German Forces in the Field – The Brown Book
Auxiliary Territorial Service Captain Malcolm became so expert on the German order of battle that she advised the Pentagon and was awarded the US Legion of Merit. From 1942, Lieutenant Sherman, who wore the Intelligence Corps cap badge on her tunic with great pride, compiled comprehensive lists of German teachers and university lecturers, each graded according to their association with the Nazi Party. In 1940, MI14 suggested that if there was an invasion of Great Britain, the aim would be German global domination and therefore the use of gas and biological weapons could not be discounted. A consequence was that the British secretly manufactured gas artillery shells and mines. On 9 December 1943, after the Allied invasion of Italy, 38 FSS was on port security at Bari when fourteen ships were sunk during a night air raid, including a US Liberty ship. The imposition of a security blanket, on the direct orders of Prime Minister Churchill on the grounds that it was carrying mustard gas, lasted about five years.
Air Photographic Interpretation had proved vital from the earliest days of the First World War but the Army lost almost all its imagery at Dunkirk. When the RAF formed the Photographic Interpretation Unit at Wembley in September 1940, three experienced Army officers were invited to form the GHQ Home Forces Army Photographic Interpretation Section (APIS) as it prepared to contest Operation Sea Lion, the German invasion. Lieutenant Neil Falcon was the first of three Intelligence Corps to join the APIS, a nomenclature that would remain until 1967. A geological air surveyor who had worked in India and Burma, he had returned to England and had enlisted in the Local Defence Volunteers before attending the Photographic Interpretation course at Farnborough. After the APIS offices in Wembley were bombed in November 1940, the joint and larger Central Interpretation Unit reformed at RAF Medmenham, in Danesford House, a month later, where it remained until the late 1970s. Many Photographic Interpreters were selected from architects, archaeologists, geologists and surveyors, but for the Army it was an officer-only skill and it was not until some began failing the War Office commissioning board that it was opened to other ranks. In June, 1941 the APIS reformed into several sections and passing under command of the Directorate of Military Intelligence as MI15. Detachments were sent to all theatres of operations.
In addition to MI9, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence had responsibility of MI19 (Prisoner of War Intelligence). Capture is a battlefield risk but few prisoners recognize the psychological condition of ‘shock of capture’ and the fear of an uncertain future in the hands of foreigners. The hunt for intelligence begins during the search phase near the point of capture and the selection for interrogation is usually dependent on demeanour, status, influence and the results of searches. Most do not appreciate their value as intelligence resources; for instance, a staff car driver may be as important as a company commander. Some prisoners will undergo progressively detailed interrogation at specialized interrogation centres. The Manual of Military Intelligence (1946) Pamphlet No. 7 describes PW Intelligence (Enemy):
The object of interrogating enemy prisoners of war and deserters and civilian refugees is to acquire information about the enemy, which, together with information from other sources, will enable commanders effectively to assess the potentialities, and so plan the destruction, of the enemy.
Signed during the euphoria that followed the 1928 Kellog Pact outlawing war, the 1929 Third Geneva Convention (Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) protected prisoners against the inhumane treatment that many had suffered between 1914 and 1918. But several signatories were slow to sign; Germany in 1934, France in 1935 and Russia, reasoning that it had no accord with Switzerland, and Japan not at all. Under Article 5:
Every prisoner is required to declare, if he is interrogated on the subject, his true names and rank, or his regimental number… If he infringes this rule, he exposes himself to a restriction of liberties of the privileges accorded to prisoners of his category.
Article 17 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention added that prisoners must also supply their date of birth. These obligations are required by the International Committee of the Red Cross to help identify prisoners of war. Prisoners are also protected under the Geneva Conventions:
No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever.
Initially, the Army had no interrogation organization but as the need for military, political, scientific and social intelligence grew, interrogations of shot down aircrew, U-Boat survivors and prisoners captured on raids centred on the Prisoner-of-War Interrogation Section (Home), in which District and Home Commands administered ‘cages’ that selected prisoners to be sent to one of Combined Services’ Detailed Interrogation Centres (CSDIC). These were at Latimer, Beaconsfield, Trent Park and Cockfosters in London and Wilton Park in Sussex. British methods of guile, deception and the widespread use of eavesdropping proved profitable. Some of those in the Monitoring Rooms listening to the unguarded conversations on military and technical intelligence were German-speaking refugees who had fled from Nazi oppression themselves. Many were ATS badged as Intelligence Corps, such as Susan Lustig (nee Cohn), who herself had left Poland in 1939. Apart from the military and technical intelligence, information on the Holocaust and other atrocities also emerged. Interrogators were trained at Hawk’s Club and the Chestnut Theological Club in Cambridge and supported by German and Italian language courses at 6 St Peter’s Terrace. The Officer’s Mess was at 21a Trinity Street with billets at Christ’s and St John’s Colleges.
When a piece of burnt paper found in the cockpit of a shot-down German aircraft attracted technical intelligence interest during the Battle of Britain, Cockfosters had an early success. In a letter to The Times in September 2010, Murray Wrobel, an Intelligence Corps second lieutenant at the time, recalled his experiences at Trent Park:
The prisoners were kept two to a room. All the rooms had been made acoustically efficient with carpets and curtains, and fitted with hidden microphones, which allowed us to record conversations on gramophone records. Sometimes, we found it paid to pair air force and naval prisoners who would try to keep each other’s morale up by talking up all the war-winning tricks they had up their sleeve. Shortly before the Blitz began, I remember the excitement when one of our microphones picked up a German air force officer telling a U-Boat captain all about the wonders of Knickebein. He explained how accurate the bombing had become, guided by two radio signal beams set to cross over the designated target so that when the two sounds merged, they knew they were directly overhead and could release their bombs.
The intelligence was passed to Air Ministry Scientific Intelligence where Dr Reginald Jones developed jamming counter-measures to defeat Knickebein. The Detailed Interrogation Centres recorded 64,427 conversations of 10,191 German and 567 Italian prisoners onto 78rpm gramophone records. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 3,500 prisoners passed through London Cage. After 1945, about 1,000 suspects gave statements during war crime investigations.
In the field, interrogators were located at all levels of command from brigade HQs upwards to Command CSDICs. The Small Scale Raiding Force, also known as 62 Commando, was formed specifically to capture prisoners from Occupied Europe. The London District Cage, commanded by Colonel Scotland, occupied Nos. 6, 7 and 8, Kensington Palace Gardens between July 1940 and September 1948 and could handle sixty prisoners. Randall Coates returned to the UK from Switzerland in 1939 and, responding to the War Office advert in The Times for linguists, was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. First posted to No. 2 Eastern Command Cage at Hounslow, he was transferred to the London Cage where Scotland allowed him to accompany Combined Operations commando raids to capture prisoners. In December 1941, Coates took part in Operation Archery against the German garrison on Vaasgo Island in Norway and, in 1942, accompanied Operation Myrmidon diversionary raid in support of the St Nazaire raid. He was then made responsible for all prisoners captured in raids to the east and north of Dover. Coates became an internationally recognized expert on mazes, designing those at Blenheim Palace, Longleat and the Château de Beloeil in Belgium.
MI2 Liaison (USSR) handled military relationships with the Soviet Union. Lieutenant Colonel Peter Squires, a Cambridge University classicist, accompanied the British Military Mission to Moscow and after arriving at Archangel in a convoy then helped unload munitions for the Red Army. He achieved the reputation of being the best non-native Russian speaker of his generation and the fastest simultaneous interpreter in Great Britain. Not unnaturally, he was treated with suspicion by the Soviets and developed elaborate counter-surveillance measures when he moved to Moscow in 1944. Major Arthur Birse interpreted for Prime Minister Churchill and gained such respect with Stalin that he was awarded the Soviet Union Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
The brief seizure of power by the pro-Nazi Vidkun Quisling in Norway and the spectre of a British Fifth Column led Prime Minister Winston Churchill to instruct the former Air Secretary Lord Swinton to establish Home Defence (Security) Executive and ‘to find out whether there was a Fifth Column in this country and, if so, to eliminate it’. As the Nationalist General Emilio Mola advanced on Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, he claimed that his four columns would be supported by a ‘fifth column’ inside the city. When the term was exploited by German propaganda to encourage the paranoia of the enemy within, the Ministry of Information magnified the corrosion by suggesting that anyone who thought that such an enemy did not exist had fallen into the trap of being persuaded that one did not exist. The Defence Regulations of the 1939 and 1940 Emergency Powers (Defence) Act restricted aircraft movement and generated investigations into 64,000 ‘aliens’, many refugees from Nazi oppression. Several thousand were either interned on the Isle of Man or sent to Canada and Australia. The legislation also restricted photography, had signposts removed and enforced control of access to military training areas and research and development facilities.
As it became evident in June 1940 that MI5 was ill-prepared for war, Prime Minister Churchill dismissed Major General Kell, Director-General since it had been formed in 1909. To fill the gaps in expertise, the Intelligence Corps provided personnel, including, in April 1941, Captain David Petrie from Middle East Command. Formerly head of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau and aged 60 years, he had been commissioned into the Corps in the Middle East. Tasked to review MI5 in November 1940 and then appointed Director-General, he injected reforms that enhanced its ability to deal with the demands of war in the busiest years of its history. The regeneration of MI5 was considerably eased by the Radio Security Service intercepting Abwehr communications. Bletchley Park cryptographers cracking ciphers in December led to Abwehr information, which was generally reliable, being highly graded as ‘ISOS’ information, ISOS stood for ‘Intelligence Service, Oliver Strachey’, the cryptographic Section head. Petrie was one of the first to question the loyalties of British communists working in sensitive government positions, some of whom were already ‘sharing’ information with Moscow, for example Captain Anthony Blunt. He had commanded 18 FSP in France and had been dismissed from an Intelligence course at Minley Manor after expressing his communist sympathies. Nevertheless, by March 1941 he was controlling Section 5 B1 (Counter Intelligence) monitoring diplomatic missions in London. Blunt had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and was exposed as a Soviet spy in the 1980s.
In September 1939, Captain Robin Stephens (2 Gurkha Rifles) exploited the ‘old boys network’ to join MI5 and was employed interviewing British Fascists and interned aliens in the Oratory Schools. But the location was not fit for purpose and when the normal occupant of one room, that was also being used as an interrogation cell, could not find his trousers on being asked to vacate it, the Swinton Committee authorized Stephens to establish an interrogation centre for non-military suspects at the Victorian mansion of Latchmere House in the suburbs of Ham Common, London. A psychiatric hospital for officers during the First World War, it was requisitioned by Stephens on 10 July and was open for business within a fortnight. In December, it was named Camp 020. The Intelligence Corps provided several officers with linguistic skills, including Japanese from 1942, as interrogators. In 1945 a German censor officer was captured with a party of Japanese diplomats by Italian partisans in Milan. After a bomb hit the camp in January 1941, Reserve Camp 020R was established at Huntercombe Internment Camp, Nuffield. Stephens insisted that since both centres dealt with suspected agents, it was not subject to the Red Cross visits, nevertheless he managed both camps using military discipline. While he trained his interrogators to believe that violence degraded the quality of information and resistant prisoners would eventually talk, he encouraged psychological intimidation, for instance, the threat of ‘You will now be taken to Cell 14’ playing on the prisoner’s worst fears. ‘Cell 14’ did not exist. Convivial conversation was the preferred option. The philosophies developed by Stephens set the standard for future Intelligence Corps interrogators.
Camp 020 received 480 suspects, 107 arriving in 1940 when invasion threatened and 119 in 1944 prior to imminent opening of the Second Front in Europe. Germans formed the bulk followed by Belgians, French, and Norwegians. Fourteen of the sixteen convicted spies were unearthed at Camp 020, including three British. The Waldburg Group of a German and three Dutchmen wading ashore near Lydd on 3 September 1940 were the first agents to arrive. In the same month, the MV La Part Bien, with a crew of three skippered by a Swede, arrived in Plymouth and told 46 FSS that they had agreed a request with some Germans in Brest to use their neutrality to collect several passengers in Le Touquet and deliver them to England. The three were sent to Camp 020 where it emerged that the Abwehr had provided the vessel but a faulty compass and a beer cask that was too much of a temptation saw them unintentionally arrive in Plymouth. Seven agents paddled ashore from flying boats and one who parachuted into Ireland made his way to Belfast where he surrendered. Compared with the frenetic activity in large ports, the HPSS in smaller harbours had to be equally alert. Sergeant Ron Barker of the Buckie Detachment, 143 (Aberdeen) HPSS was involved in the capture of two men and a Belgian woman who arrived in Cluny on 30 September 1940 in a dinghy. But discrepancies in her story and the wireless, revolver, codes and list of aerodromes in the suitcase carried by one of the two men exposed them as agents. When an Edinburgh railway station porter then reported that a man had deposited a damp suitcase in a left luggage locker, Werner Waelti was arrested by an armed police surveillance team. Inside was another wireless and codes. All were transferred to Camp 020 where a Belgian stool pigeon was used in their interrogations. MI6 information confirmed that the woman had lost her temper with a Major Ritter during a meeting in Brussels. All were convicted and the two men executed, one of them eventually admitting to being Abwehr.
Twenty-nine British were interrogated at Camp 020, most before October 1940. In 1939, when the cruiser HMS Gloucester visited Dar es Salaam, Ordinary Seaman Duncan Scott-Ford was smitten by the daughter of a German landowner and shared naval codes with her. A year later, he became embroiled with an Egyptian prostitute in Alexandra but when she became expensive and he ‘cooked’ an account book, he was dismissed from the Royal Navy. He joined the Merchant Navy and when his ship anchored off Lisbon in May 1942, he was talent-spotted by an Abwehr agent named Rittman, who promised to deliver a letter to the daughter provided that he found out why all British ships had to be in port on 28 June. Scott-Ford had two further meetings with Rittman and a friend in which he supplied information on convoy routes, casualties from U-Boat attacks and morale in Great Britain. They tasked him to collect identity cards, ration books and clothing cards. When Scott-Ford arrived in Liverpool eight days later, he admitted during the routine Home Port Security check that he had been approached by German agents but claimed that he had rejected their requests. Returning to Lisbon in July, he re-established his contact with the Germans. Meanwhile, his treachery had been confirmed by ISOS information and when his ship, the SS Finland, docked at Salford on 19 August, Scott-Ford was arrested by 118 (Liverpool) FSS and admitted to meeting Abwehr agents but denied giving information. Transferred to Camp 020, he supplied information on German activities in Lisbon; nevertheless, he was charged under the 1940 Treachery Act that ‘with intent to help the enemy, did an act between 7-9 March 1942, that is, he did record information relating to the movements and composition of a convoy’. He was executed in November 1942, a dark year for the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic. A German aircraft bombed the offices of 118 FSS at Eastham Lock. The aircraft was then shot down and Company Sergeant Major Duke rushed to the crash site and rescued the surviving aircrew from being lynched.
One Camp 020 task delegated to the Intelligence Corps was to provide ‘minders’ for the agents ‘turned’ by MI5, who were known as ‘bonzos’. The deception had originated in 1936 after an MI5 officer had criticized the prosecution of defecting agents and had suggested ‘turning’ them. The management of the exploitation was delegated to the Twenty Committee, which took its nomenclature from Roman numeral for twenty, XX, or double cross. Its Chairman for most of the war was Lieutenant Colonel John Masterman, an Intelligence Corps officer attached to MI5. Several Corps officers were agent controllers. Sergeant Andrew Corcoran transferred from the Royal Armoured Corps in April 1941 and was posted to 307 (Special) FSS on port security in London and then to 308 FSS, which, in January 1942, was listed as a War Office Reserve section but actually supported MI 5 and had a higher number of sergeants than other FS sections. In 1942 Corcoran was allocated two Norwegians nicknamed ‘Mutt’, the wireless operator, and ‘Jeff’, who had surrendered to the police after paddling ashore to a Banffshire beach from a flying boat. Transferred within twenty-fours from Camp 020 as ‘bonzos’, they were escorted by Corcoran to the safe house at 35, Crespigny Road, Hendon, from where he escorted them around Great Britain so that they could give their phony reports credence. In the event that the operation was compromised, Corcoran was to activate Operation Hegira, dismantle ‘Mutt’s’ antenna at Crespigny Road, burn sensitive documents, collect a Polish Air Force officer also posing as a double agent, and make his way to a safe house in North Wales. Sergeant Paul Backwell and Corporal Allan Tooth, from 50 FSS, ‘minded’ the British double agent Eddie Chapman, alias Agent ZigZag, at Crespigny Road and helped organize his dummy sabotage of the de Havilland aircraft factory to convince the Abwehr that he was one of their agents. Before returning to Lisbon, Corporal Hale tested Chapman’s cover. Continuing his double cross, Chapman was awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans.
Responsibility for GHQ Home Forces security at St Paul’s School, Hammersmith and its emergency Command Post underneath Wentworth Golf Clubhouse was also held by 50 FSS. Corporal Norman Kirk, a languages teacher and transferee from the Royal Engineers, was one of seven NCOs from the Section trained in sabotage at a SOE Special Training School under the direction of Lord Victor Rothschild, then head of MI5 B1 (Counter-sabotage). Setting a precedent for future Intelligence Corps security sections, the seven spent the next eight months on a nationwide exercise testing infrastructure key point security, for instance, by using false papers at the main gate, breaching the perimeter fencing and placing dummy bombs. Completely self sufficient and living in seedy flats, the ‘saboteurs’ risked being bitten by dogs, shot at by trigger-happy Home Guard and interrogated by local police officers, quite apart from falling into rivers and being suspended on barbed wire. Rothschild was commissioned into the Corps in 1943. A post-1945 successor to this role was 163 Special Security Section, which specialized in conducting anti Soviet Spetsnaz sabotage operations.
MI5 B1 (D) established the London Reception Centre at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School, Trinity Road, Wandsworth and 14 Kenrick Place, SW1 in January 1941. From July 1941, the MI9 liaison officer was Captain A.E. Acton-Burnell. A year later, MI9 and MI19 were both placed under the direct control of the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence with London Reception Centre placed with the latter. Commanded by the canny Dutch Military Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto, its interrogators vetted 30,000 people who wished to enter Great Britain and achieved the fine balance of trapping spies and ensuring that bona fide exiles did not feel that they had escaped from the Gestapo and General Franco’s police only to fall into the hands of an equally unpleasant security organization. Its collation cell dissected possessions that could be used by Allied agents, such as identity documents, a bus ticket, clothing, and cigarettes, and developed not a picture of life in Occupied Europe, but also collated German counter-intelligence methods, including Gestapo interrogation and operations against resistance networks. The television series Spycatcher between 1959 and 1961 dramatized identifying enemy agents at the Centre.
MI6 had played a significant role during the First World War and since, but its Second World War performance was precipitated by calamity in September 1939 when Captain Sigmund Payne-Best, one of the first 1914 Intelligence Corps officers, now heading Section Z in the Netherlands, and Major Richard Stevens, the Passport Control Officer at the British Embassy, were fooled by the SD head of counter-intelligence, SS-Major Walter Schellenberg, into meeting fake anti-Hitler conspirators and were captured in the Venlo Incident. Both spent the war in several concentration camps. Their tradecraft failures of carrying compromising information and skilled interrogation led to MI6 operations in Europe proving difficult for agents and contacts, particularly in Czechoslovakia. Several members of the Corps served with MI6.
The Political Warfare Executive conducted psychological warfare operations using such measures as propaganda and ‘black flag’ propaganda broadcasts purporting to be of German origin, but internal conflicts with BBC, Special Operations Executive and MI6 proved counter-productive. It lacked an effective intelligence department until Brigadier Eric Sachs MBE (late Royal Artillery), a barrister, arrived as Director, however, interdepartmental faction disagreements sometimes led to him being denied classified information until he appointed a Director of Intelligence in 1942. Several Intelligence Corps served in the Executive.