EAVESDROPPING ON THE ENEMY
The prospect of a swift end to the war via a military coup by a clique of Hitler’s generals had turned out to be a ruse by the Abwehr that targeted SIS. Kendrick was astute enough to know that the long, slow intelligence game was now Britain’s only hope of eventually defeating Nazi Germany. Experience had taught him that battles are won by intelligence and the quality of intelligence. His unique knowledge of Germany and his understanding of German psychology since the First World War, as well as his experience of Nazi Germany in the 1930s from his years in Vienna, made him a highly experienced and successful intelligence officer. His foresight in understanding that his new eavesdropping unit could produce intelligence capable of substantially altering the course of the war, and his expertise and determination in turning the M Room project into a major intelligence-gathering operation, arguably saved MI6 in the end. The key points of the M Room operation are outlined here; but a much more detailed and comprehensive history can be read in my book The Walls Have Ears, the first such account by a British historian and featuring unique interviews with veterans.
From October 1939, Kendrick focused on substantially increasing the bugging programme and making the site at Trent Park fit for purpose.1 A specialist team from Dollis Hill Research Station installed state-of-the-art eavesdropping equipment in five interrogation rooms and six bedrooms in the mansion house, as well as in rooms in the stable block. This work took five months to complete.2 The installation team was required to sign the Official Secrets Act, and Kendrick witnessed and countersigned the declarations. False panels and double ceilings were installed inside the house, in part to help with the soundproofing. Tiny microphones were concealed in the fireplaces and light fittings, with the wiring well concealed behind the wall panels and skirting boards. Temporary buildings were erected next to the main house, to accommodate interrogation rooms and an M Room.
The operation was dramatically scaled up as Kendrick increased his staff to just over 500, a third of them women.3 This marked the beginning of a highly efficient, methodical intelligence-gathering ‘factory’ organized by Kendrick. He kept a tight rein on it, and it was no coincidence that his office was set up in the Blue Room of the mansion house – directly above one of the M Rooms. On his desk he had special equipment that enabled him to plug into any of the bugged bedrooms and interrogation rooms and to listen in via headphones or on a loudspeaker. The scale of the operation that was beginning to unfold is staggering. Kendrick – the spymaster – was orchestrating a superbly efficient spy network – targeted at the enemy, but on British soil.
Technology and HUMINT
Between January 1940 and the spring of 1942, over 3,000 German and Italian POWs were processed through Trent Park; at this stage in the war, the majority comprised Luftwaffe officers and U-boat crew. It became one of the most successful and far-reaching technology-driven HUMINT deception operations in the Second World War.
A prisoner expected to be interrogated after capture; but, as Kendrick discovered, this was most fruitful when used in conjunction with the listening operation and stool pigeons. As he wrote in a memorandum to Norman Crockatt (head of MI9):
Whilst direct interrogation may provide valuable information it cannot, as a general rule, reasonably be expected to provide the same insight into the prisoner’s mind as is possible by the proper use of the listening method, which in addition to providing independent intelligence, often provides the interrogators with a check on statements made to them.4
It was his foresight in combining the three techniques – interrogation, stool pigeons and hidden microphones – that made the operation as an extraordinary success story.5
The state-of-the-art microphones used could pick up even a whispered conversation between prisoners, as former intelligence officer Catherine Townshend recalled:
After an extensive examination of the walls, floor and furniture of his room, a senior prisoner was heard to say to his cellmate: ‘There are no microphones here.’ But for safety’s sake the two men decided that they could converse more freely if they leant far out of the window. Little did they suspect that in addition to a minute microphone attached to the ceiling light fixture, another was hidden in the outside wall beneath the window sill.6
The authorities always tried to ensure that prisoners shared a room with someone carefully selected. Thus, back in their cells after interrogation, each man would begin to discuss the war with his cellmate – and often mentioned new technology being employed by the German navy or air force. Idle chatter by prisoners before interrogation offered the interrogators advance warning of what a prisoner might know and could be trying to withhold from them. After interrogation, a prisoner would often boast to his cellmate what he had not revealed. Kendrick reported that the attitude of prisoners who were security conscious could be broken down ‘by careful grouping of POWs and by devising ways and means of disarming suspicion’.7 He held a weekly conference with the operations staff, and this proved extremely useful in promoting discussion of ways in which the modus operandi could be adapted to the changing intelligence needs of the day. He also issued a ‘Weekly Personal Report’, but these appear not to have been declassified into the National Archives.8
It was U-boat personnel, as early as January 1940, who gave Kendrick’s unit one of its earliest intelligence coups of the war, when they revealed secrets about German naval Enigma. This was to have a direct impact on the work at Bletchley Park, and is a good example of where a bugged conversation had a direct impact operationally.9 The information came from U-boat Petty Officer Erich May of U-35, a U-boat that had been scuttled at the end of November 1939.10 May proved so valuable to British intelligence that he was still being held at Trent Park in January 1940.11 Naval interrogator Richard Pennell (RNVR) gained the trust of May to such an extent that the latter began to discuss with him how German naval Enigma worked.12
He provided valuable information on naval codes and short signals, which confirmed that the German navy spelt out numerals in full, instead of using the top row of a keyboard.13 The transcripts of conversations between May and Pennell, which had been recorded in the M Room, were sent direct to Bletchley Park’s head, Commander Alastair Denniston, and to his cryptographers, Dilly Knox, Oliver Strachey and Frank Birch. The information was passed to Alan Turing and, as a result, he looked again at the German encryption for 28 November 1938 and came to the conclusion that British analysis of it had been fundamentally correct, provided the numerals were spelt out.14 He and his colleagues turned to the unbroken cribs of shortly before December 1938 and, based on the new intelligence from Trent Park, they were able to break the code within a fortnight. The history of Hut 8 in declassified files at the National Archives confirms that naval Enigma was cracked using special intelligence garnered from prisoners of war at Kendrick’s site.15
Throughout the war, Axis prisoners continued to provide intelligence on German codes, Enigma and communications that was of direct relevance to Bletchley Park. Indeed, in an indication of the close cooperation that existed between CSDIC and the codebreaking site, Kendrick placed suitable rooms at the disposal of personnel from Bletchley Park, so that they could come and interrogate any prisoners who had specialist knowledge of German codes and Enigma.16 This close relationship continued throughout the conflict.
Intelligence from enemy POWs
The intelligence gathered by the combined services unit became increasingly detailed and of much greater significance. CSDIC disseminated vast quantities of information and snippets of intelligence about the enemy to those departments that needed to see it – from MI5, MI6 and MI14 to the War Office, Bomber Command, the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and – eventually, once the United States entered the war in December 1941 – to US intelligence. Kendrick’s first intelligence summary of the unit’s work, which covered September 1939 to December 1940, demonstrates the extensive and detailed information about Germany’s military capabilities that was being harvested by eavesdropping on prisoners’ conversations.17 An appendix to his report provides a comprehensive list of the topics on which reports were available, based on interrogations and recorded conversations. The subjects included aerodromes in German-occupied countries, artillery, enemy aircraft equipment and navigational technology, the Gestapo, conditions in Germany, hand grenades, identification of German units and aircraft production, German paratroopers, Poland, rockets, weapons and torpedoes, U-boat movements and tactics, tanks, Jews, the SS and the strength of enemy armed forces.18 Information had been gained on U-boat operations around Norway between April and June 1940, as well as on British submarines in the region – essential for assessing how much the Germans knew about British naval operations.19
Major General Francis H. Davidson, the new director of military intelligence, was impressed by Kendrick’s first report, commenting: ‘The general spirit of this Survey (and the weekly reports) shows the true spirit of attacking intelligence.’20
Airmen POWs not infrequently alluded in their conversations to technology on board their aircraft – often ‘a considerable time before the emergence of such a weapon in operations’.21 In February 1940, the microphones picked up the first mentions of new technology being used by the Luftwaffe, called X-Gerät and Knickebein.22 The system functioned like an early radar system, enabling German pilots to conduct more precise bombing raids across Britain. It was the first inkling that British intelligence had of this new technology. Armed with information about X-Gerät from the special recordings, the Air Ministry was able to build a profile of the German war capability and to develop counter-technology.23 As Professor R.V. Jones, scientific adviser to MI6, confirmed, the British countermeasures resulted in the deflection of many bombs from their intended targets. Kendrick’s close friend and colleague Denys Felkin (head of air intelligence at Trent Park) concluded that the discovery of the existence of X-Gerät and Knickebein had ‘the most far-reaching consequences . . . [The developments were] reported in time for the British authorities to prepare countermeasures against a method of bombing which in the autumn of 1940 constituted a very real threat to British war industries.’24 It gave Britain time to improve its defences, so that the German air force had to find new ways of attacking.
The uncovering of X-Gerät and Knickebein was so critical that Norman Crockatt, head of MI9, wrote to Kendrick to congratulate him and ‘those officers under you who contributed so largely to one of the most successful pieces of intelligence investigation I have ever come across’.25 Crockatt later reported that: ‘The secret recordings produced some of the earliest information of the German experiments in Air Navigational aids [March 1940], and has played an important part in the successful development of the British counter-measures.’26 German radar devices – both land and airborne – continued to be reported by prisoners throughout the war, in many cases ahead of their appearance in the various theatres of battle.
All transcripts of conversations and interrogations were filed in a newly compiled index library, so that if a particular subject became relevant or urgent as the war progressed, the appropriate transcripts could be pulled from the filing cabinets and consulted. To gauge the usefulness or otherwise of the recorded conversations, Kendrick sent a questionnaire to the intelligence departments. The response from Admiral John Godfrey, head of naval intelligence, was telling:
Without them [the Special Reports] it would have been impossible to piece together the histories of [enemy] ships, their activities and the tactics employed by U-boats in attacking convoys. The hardest naval information to obtain with any degree of reliability concerned technical matters . . . I wish to convey to the staff at the CSDIC my warm appreciation of their work.27
Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, reinforced the importance of the work from the MI6 angle:
The reports are of distinct value, and I trust the work will be maintained and every possible assistance given to the Centre [CSDIC]. It is essential that the Service Departments should collaborate closely by providing Kendrick with the latest questionnaires, without which he must be working largely in the dark.28
The expansion of the bugging operation was proving successful. At moments of crisis in this war, Kendrick could be relied upon to deliver intelligence. He was confident in his methods, because he understood the prisoners: he understood human nature and how best to secure information. While it is true that the thousands of transcripts emanating from Trent Park offered screeds of information in piecemeal form, this could be used to corroborate intelligence coming in from other sources (such as Bletchley Park or the resistance movements in Europe). However, CSDIC could equally well provide the first source of intelligence.
The success of this almost mechanized, efficient system of intelligence gathering depended largely on the hard work of the personnel, day in and day out. In no small part, this was encouraged by the atmosphere that Kendrick – so adroit at interpersonal relationships – created at the site. It was his character that held the unit together, and he enjoyed the respect of personnel of all ranks and from all services. It was his vision and his skills that led to the establishment of the first wide-ranging operation combining HUMINT and technology. In this respect, he demonstrated his ability to set up and run an unprecedented, innovative and sophisticated organization from scratch, in very short order and at a time when Britain was fighting for survival.
1. Thomas Joseph Kendrick in Vienna in the 1930s where he was posted as the British passport control officer, a cover for his real role as head of station for the Secret Intelligence Service. His post was considered SIS’s most important station in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was from Vienna that he ran his own spy networks into Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany and Italy.
2. Kendrick with army colleagues in 1901 during the Second Boer War. Kendrick is the man driving the vehicle. In January 1901 Kendrick volunteered for the British forces in South Africa and with the Cape Colony Cyclists’ Corps. It gave him the basic tools for field intelligence operations that would enable him to become a major player in British espionage for nearly 40 years.
3. Norah Wecke whom Kendrick married by special licence in Cape Town on 29 March 1910. Norah was the daughter of Friedrich Wecke, a German businessman and manager of a diamond mine who had settled in Lüderitzbucht in German-occupied South West Africa. Kendrick worked for Wecke from 1905 for five years.
4. Gladys Kendrick on her wedding day to Geoffrey Walsh, 29 March 1931. They married at a civic ceremony at the British Consulate in Vienna, followed by a religious ceremony in the Roman Catholic Maria Geburt Kirche. The high-society wedding included many guests from aristocratic and diplomatic circles. An extravagant reception was held afterwards in Kendrick’s apartment.
5. Kendrick with granddaughter Barbara in Vienna, c. 1937.
6. Clara Holmes, an expert skier, with her daughter Prudence at an Austrian ski resort during the 1930s. Holmes was one of Kendrick’s SIS secretaries who worked undercover at the British passport control office, communicating with agents across Europe using invisible ink.
7. Adolf Hitler making a triumphant entry into Vienna on 14 March 1938, two days after his forces annexed Austria into the Third Reich in an action termed ‘the Anschluss’. It marked the beginning of seven years of incorporation of the country into Germany, a period which saw the Nazi decimation of Viennese culture and Jewish life.
8. Dr Erwin Pulay, an eminent skin specialist and close friend of Sigmund Freud. As a Jew, Pulay was at risk of arrest, and so Kendrick enabled him to flee Austria within days of the Anschluss. Kendrick went on to save thousands of Austrian Jews until his own arrest in August 1938. His humanitarian efforts have yet to be fully recognized.
9. Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, whom it is believed was helped out of Vienna in early June 1938 by Kendrick and the Americans. Freud is pictured here shortly after his arrival in England, a desperately ill man. He died the following year, on 23 September 1939.
10. Kendrick’s daughter and grandchildren saying goodbye to Kendrick and Norah at Vienna train station, 19 July 1938. Kendrick deemed it no longer safe for them to remain in Vienna. Also there to see them off safely were Deti (the children’s nanny), Kendrick’s friends Mary and Hans Schick, and Edmund Pollitzer, a family friend and one of Kendrick’s agents.
11. Gladys, Barbara and Ken leaving Vienna by train on 19 July 1938 for a new life in Scotland. Kendrick is pictured here, but only his trilby hat is visible.
12. Passport of Willi Bondi who lived in Brno, Czechoslovakia, believed to have been one of Kendrick’s agents. By 1938 he was working for the import-export business Fleischers, which was owned by his two brothers-in-law. His passport shows repeated visits between Czechoslovakia and Austria in June, July and August 1938 at a crucial time, against mounting expectation of a German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Bondi had visited Austria only once or twice between the years 1933 and 1936, so the frenetic activity of 1938 was atypical.
13. The entry stamps into Austria in Willi Bondi’s passport. Blond and blue-eyed, Bondi chose not to escape the Nazi regime, but other members of his family were saved by Kendrick. Bondi was later arrested, not for being Jewish, but for political reasons. His interrogations made it clear that the Gestapo suspected him of passing intelligence to the British. He was shot in Auschwitz on 30 August 1941.
14. The wedding of Countess Marianne Szápáry to Günther von Reibnitz, December 1941. It was discovered during the writing of this book that the countess, who is the mother of Her Royal Highness Marie-Christine, Princess Michael of Kent, worked for Kendrick and SIS in the 1930s.
15. Kendrick’s brother-in-law Rex Pearson who married Olga Wecke (sister of Norah Kendrick). Pearson first met Kendrick in South Africa after the Boer War. In the First World War Kendrick transferred to the Intelligence Corps on Pearson’s recommendation and they served together in intelligence duties in France. They subsequently spent the rest of their careers in the SIS, commonly known as MI6, and were among the higher echelons of the British Secret Service.
16. Franz Bernklau, the chauffeur used by Kendrick in Vienna. Bernklau was driving the car with Kendrick and Norah in the back when it was stopped at the border town of Freilassing on 17 August 1938. The border police had been alerted that Kendrick was trying to flee the country. Kendrick was arrested and driven back to Vienna to face the Gestapo.
17. The Hotel Metropole, Vienna. After the Anschluss the hotel became the Gestapo headquarters. Kendrick was brought here from Freilassing and subjected to four days of ‘Soviet-style’ interrogations. He was held in an attic room next to the former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg and Baron Louis Rothschild. The German authorities sarcastically assured Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, that Kendrick had ‘one of their best rooms’.
18. After intense diplomatic activity, the German authorities released Kendrick on condition he left the country within 24 hours. He was formally expelled from Austria on charges of suspected espionage, for which the Germans claimed to have reliable evidence. The expulsion was prominently reported in the world’s media. Reporters waited outside his apartment in Vienna to speak with him, but Kendrick and his wife had already been smuggled by car into Hungary to avoid arrest.
19. Kendrick’s arrival back at Croydon aerodrome on 22 August 1938. He refused to answer questions to waiting reporters and was taken off to the Foreign Office and MI6 headquarters for debriefing.
20. Stewart Menzies, who became the third head of MI6 in 1939. Kendrick and Menzies were colleagues in intelligence since the days of the First World War when both were engaged in counter-espionage activities for British intelligence.
21. Kendrick at Latimer House, one of his wartime eavesdropping sites. During the Second World War he set up and commanded a unit that secretly recorded the unguarded conversations of over 10,000 German and Italian prisoners of war to gain crucial intelligence for the Allies. The success of this huge operation was largely due to his character and masterful skills as a spymaster.
22. Trent Park at Cockfosters, North London. The house and estate were requisitioned in October 1939 and ‘wired for sound’. Kendrick moved here from the Tower of London in December 1939. From 1942 until late 1945, the house held Hitler’s captured generals and senior officers. The German generals were treated to a life of relative luxury in this house, little realizing that their conversations were being secretly recorded via hidden microphones.
23. Kendrick’s military identity pass as the commanding officer of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, as his clandestine unit was named. Although still a senior member of SIS/MI6, he was attached to the Intelligence Corps and back in military uniform from 1939 until 1945.
24. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and designated successor. Hess flew to Scotland on a peace mission on 10 May 1941, baling out near the Duke of Hamilton’s estate, Dungavel. Hess was arrested and soon found himself in the care of three MI6 minders at Mytchett Place near Aldershot. They were Kendrick (aka ‘Colonel Wallace’), Frank Foley and ‘Captain Barnes’.
25. The identity pass of chief engineer J.F. Doust of the Post Office Research, Dollis Hill, North London. Doust and his engineers installed hidden microphones at Mytchett Place (also known as Camp Z) prior to Hess’s arrival there. Doust was responsible for inspecting the secret equipment and dealing with any technical issues that arose on site. No entry was permitted into the camp without one of these passes – marked with a red cross – and had to be authorised by ‘C’, the head of MI6.
26. Latimer House, near Chesham in Buckinghamshire which became Kendrick’s headquarters from July 1942 when he moved out there from Trent Park. By the summer of 1942, Kendrick had expanded the unit further and now commanded three eavesdropping sites for British intelligence at Latimer House, Wilton Park at Beaconsfield and Trent Park.
27. A view of the White House at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, Kendrick’s third eavesdropping site, some eight miles from Latimer House. Until the end of the war, the site processed thousands of lower rank German POWs, especially a number of German generals captured after D-Day and before their transfer to Trent Park.
28. The naval intelligence team outside Latimer House, summer 1943. Recruited by Ian Fleming, it was part of the tri-services personnel operating at Kendrick’s sites. They interrogated German POWs across the services, not only U-boat crews. Ralph Izzard (tall man standing alone at the back). From left to right (standing): unknown, unknown, Ian Fleming, Commander Burton Cope, Richard Weatherby, Donald Welbourn, unknown. From left to right (seated): Jean Flower, Evelyn Barron, George Blake, Esme Mackenzie, Gwendoline Neel-Wall.
29. Drinks party of the naval intelligence team on the terrace at Latimer House, summer 1943. Pink gin was the favourite cocktail, a somewhat exotic choice in wartime. Visible in the photograph are the same members as Plate 28, including George Blake (smiling, standing on the right in the foreground).
30. Lieutenant General Theodor von Sponeck and Friedrich von Broich, chauffeured to Trent Park after surrendering with the German army in Tunisia in May 1943. Little did they realize during their time at Trent Park that their conversations were being recorded by secret listeners from the three ‘M Rooms’ in the basement.
31. German generals landing at Plymouth, Devon, after capture on the battlefields of Normandy, June 1944. Thousands of German POWs were captured during the Normandy campaign and the most important transferred to Kendrick’s sites for detailed interrogation and their conversations recorded in the cells. Kendrick’s unit amassed tens of thousands of transcripts which survive in the National Archives, London.
32. Commanding Officer Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick (seated in the middle), pictured here with the army intelligence officers of CSDIC, Latimer House, c. 1944.
33. Christmas party for non-commissioned officers in a Nissen hut at Latimer House. Pictured here are male secret listeners who fled Nazi oppression, volunteered for the British army and later transferred to the Intelligence Corps and Kendrick’s wartime sites. Here, too, are female German-Jewish refugees who carried out vital intelligence work, including translation and typing of the transcripts of bugged conversations.
34. In retirement, Thomas Kendrick with friends at his house in Oxshott, Surrey, c. 1960s. From left to right: Frederick Warner (Dental Dean of Guy’s Hospital), Gladys Walsh, Kendrick, Kathleen Montague (Gladys Walsh’s sister-in-law).
35. The Kendricks in England with their close friends from the Vienna days, c. 1960s. From left to right: Hans Schick, Norah Kendrick, Mary Schick, Thomas Kendrick. Kendrick managed to get Hans Schick, a Jewish lawyer, and his wife Mary out of Austria. They remained life-long friends.
36. From left to right: Thomas Kendrick, his sister Mary Rowlands and his wife Norah at Briarholme, Oxshott.
The unit’s work was so valuable to the outcome of the war that its existence had to be heavily protected. Charles Deveson, an intelligence officer, recalled that on his first day he was called into Kendrick’s office and ordered to sign the Official Secrets Act.29 Kendrick slid a pistol across the desk and looked Deveson straight in the eye: ‘If you ever betray anything about this work, here is the gun with which I expect you to do the decent thing. If you don’t, I will.’30
Though a jovial military commander, who on the surface seemed like an amiable grandfather, Kendrick had a serious side – a deadly side that meant he would kill to protect his country. Betrayal of this operation had only one possible ending.
The Battle of Britain
The fall of Norway and Denmark in April 1940 to the German invading forces, and of the Low Countries and France in May 1940, left Britain standing alone against Nazi Germany. Now more than ever, it was up to Kendrick’s unit to harvest intelligence in an effort to keep ahead in the war. Central to this was intelligence on the Luftwaffe, new technology and fighter tactics. Britain had to retain air superiority over the Luftwaffe in order to avert an invasion of its shores by Hitler’s forces under cover of German aircraft. It is no exaggeration to say that the Battle of Britain, fought from July 1940 to October 1940, was a fight for survival. The conversations of Axis prisoners at this time were peppered with information on new aircraft being developed in Germany, including details of the new Focke-Wulf fighters, gleaned from German pilots shot down in the Battle of Britain:31
Prisoner A: The Focke-Wulf fighters ought to be out.
Prisoner B: We have been told they are already on their way, these birds – 700 or 720 [km/hour] cruising speed – at any rate, according to a friend of mine who has flown them.32
Those prisoners had just provided details of a new German aircraft in development and being tested, including details of its capability.
Other prisoners continued to talk about losses, as in the case of Prisoner A427 (true name unknown), who commented to his cellmate: ‘Only five out of eight of our aircraft come back . . . We are losing too many aircraft . . . We have lost our best airmen.’33 Such snippets of information were analysed by the British in an attempt to gauge the true losses of German aircraft and fighting capability.
There were eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Britain from the enemy perspective, as it was happening. On 2 September 1940, two prisoners being held at Trent Park watched a dogfight overhead between German aircraft and British Spitfires. Their bugged conversation captured a moment when the battle was actually taking place:
Prisoner B: You can see it from here, a Spitfire up there. Just there – underneath. It has flown in a sort of arc. There it comes again over here.
Prisoner A: Oh! There is a Zerstörer [heavy fighter] (More M.G. [machine-gun] fire and roaring of engines is heard). There it is again, the Spitfire, always following up.
Prisoner B: Yes!
Prisoner A: It seems to be coming down [the German ME 110]. It’s already on fire.
Prisoner B: Now he’s dropping incendiary bombs.
Prisoner A: Now you can see how fast it is [the Spitfire].34
Today, the transcripts are historically significant, as they preserve rare conversations of the Second World War and eyewitness accounts of the war from an enemy perspective. The dialogues are very natural and human: at one point Prisoner A437 described to his cellmate how, after capture, he had been given a really good meal of fried eggs and bacon, toast, jam and butter. His cellmate piped up: ‘Well, you don’t get a meal like that in the whole of our armed forces.’35
During 1940, most prisoners expected the invasion to be imminent. But by 1941, their hopes had waned and they were increasingly sceptical that there would be any invasion of England at all. Even so, there could be no let-up in the intelligence gathering. The eavesdropping programme continued throughout 1941, with prisoners starting to speak about the heavy U-boat losses suffered. The surviving crew from the Admiral Graf Spee and the warship Gneisenau were brought to Trent Park, where they were monitored discussing the movements and tactics of their vessels. They also spoke about the German battleship Scharnhorst – the same ship whose construction in the 1930s had so interested Kendrick’s agents dispatched from Vienna. Survivors of the Bismarck described its last voyage in considerable detail, including the damage inflicted on it by HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. In all, 110 survivors were picked up (from a crew of 2,200) and brought to Trent Park. In their unguarded conversations, German seamen gave away the names of shipyards, their locations on the Baltic coast and details of their production of new U-boats and warships.36 Some shipyards were already known to the British, such as Kiel and Wilhelmshaven – facilities that remained as important to Kendrick’s intelligence work as they had been in the 1930s.
The most intense battles were being fought at sea, and vital information about the Battle of the Atlantic was being harvested from prisoners of war passing through Kendrick’s site.37 On technical matters, the most important naval information for this period was the development of a new magnetically fused torpedo.38
From Trent Park came the first confirmation that Hitler was shifting his focus away from invasion to a marine campaign and blockade of supplies into Britain.39 It was vital for British commanders to anticipate the enemy’s next move if they were to maintain supremacy of the seas through difficult battles that would last most of the war. For that, intelligence was needed – and a major source was the M Room transcripts.
Kendrick believed that Britain would win the intelligence war. But Trent Park was to prove inadequate to deal with the thousands of German prisoners who would be captured on the battlefields and at sea. In response, Kendrick scaled up his operations and expanded capacity yet further.
Secret houses
In early 1941, Kendrick requisitioned Latimer House, near Chesham, and Wilton Park at Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire. The sites were chosen because they were secluded and yet were within easy reach of London, only some 25–30 miles away. So valuable for the war effort was the intelligence that had already been generated at Trent Park that the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee (JIC) in London authorized an unlimited budget for Kendrick to make Latimer House and Wilton Park operational. It concluded that Kendrick’s unit was:
Of the utmost operational importance, vital to the needs of the three fighting services and should accordingly be given the highest degree of priority in all its requirements; that the normal formalities regarding surveys, plans and tenders should be waived and that any work required should be put in hand at once and completed by the earliest possible date irrespective of cost.40
This endorsement was signed by, among others, Stewart Menzies (‘C’), John Godfrey (head of naval intelligence) and Francis Davidson (director of military intelligence).
A declassified memo (marked ‘To be Kept under Lock and Key’) indicates the cost involved in expanding to these two sites: £400,000 (roughly £25 million today).41 This involved the construction of a complex of temporary prefabricated buildings at both sites, known as the ‘Spider’. It consisted of cells, an interrogation and administration block, M Room, a cookhouse, guard block and Nissen huts in the grounds. The rooms were fitted with bugging devices and wired to M Room. Kendrick increased his complement of staff across the sites to 967 army personnel (intelligence and non-intelligence);42 the naval intelligence team there was expanded by Ian Fleming.43 Within the year, Fleming himself had moved to Buckinghamshire to train his 30 Assault Unit at nearby Shardeloes House, Amersham. He was a frequent visitor to Latimer House and was photographed with the naval intelligence team on site and at a drinks party on the balcony of the mansion house.
Fleming’s boss, John Godfrey, commented that he regarded the expansion of CSDIC as ‘of such importance as to override normal considerations of cost and I hope that you will be able to use every endeavour to see that this expansion is given absolute priority’. The JIC decided that Kendrick did not need to go through the usual channels for the authorization of funds for any aspect of his unit’s work.44 It was an extraordinary situation and serves to emphasize both the importance of his operation and also the trust placed in him as commanding officer. The JIC also took the important decision to downgrade the new aerodrome at Bovingdon, just four miles away from Latimer House, to avoid noise interference with the listening work going on there. The aerodrome was nearly complete and had cost around £300,000. This underlines again the priority attached to intelligence gathering, which trumped even operational airfields for Bomber Command.
While construction continued at Latimer House and Wilton Park, Kendrick received a telephone call from his boss, ‘C’. Kendrick’s war was about to take an unexpected turn as he, with two other SIS officers – Frank Foley and a certain ‘Captain R. Barnes’ (whose identify has never been revealed) – was about to take charge of the most prized and highest-ranking German prisoner ever to be held in Britain.