The circus, p.2
The Circus, page 2
Accompanying the first troops in each liberated area were joint British and American intelligence teams, armed with their ‘Purple Primers.' These were ordinary school exercise books containing the names and addresses, or other identifying information, of enemy stay-behind agents. Each would be visited even as the local fighting continued and offered a simple choice: imprisonment and possible execution, or co-operation. Most opted for the latter and, in so doing, extended the Continent-wide network of ‘controlled' double agents.
The information contained in the Purple Primers had been collated over the previous three years and was mainly the combined product of three separate organizations: the Radio Security Service, the Bl(b) analysts and MI3, the German order of battle experts.
The Radio Security Service monitored all wireless transmissions and used direction-finding equipment to locate the sources of suspicious transmissions. Most stay-behind agents, equipped with radios, sent several test messages back to. their German controllers before being overrun and this enabled the locations of suspects to be identified long before the front-line troops had arrived on the scene. Frequently radio intelligence coincided with details which had already been filed by the Bl(c) officers, who had a vast store of knowledge on German intelligence techniques and personalities. As well as drawing on signals intelligence they had access to prisoner interrogation reports from MI 19, the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centres. All suspected Nazi agents and known enemy intelligence personnel were passed to MI 19 as soon as their identities had been verified. Delay between capture and first interview was kept to the minimum, thus enabling Bl(b) to have the very latest information. Finally the accumulated material was passed to MI3, who constantly updated the Purple Primers.
Thus the Allies slowly took clandestine control of all the enemy’s intelligence. As more networks were overrun, so the amount of intelligence escalated, providing further opportunities for strategic deception. The system proved to be especially successful during the last months of the war when the Luftwaffe were unable to verify their intelligence assessments by photographic reconnaissance.
Once an area had been liberated and the situation stabilized, MI5 staff had to help Field Security Wings obtain enemy intelligence documentation and vet prisoners in order to identify captured Abwehr or Sicherheitsdienst (SD) officers. MI5 also had to clear up any cases where British subjects were thought to have aided the enemy.
One of the first such ‘clearing up’ operations involved P.G. Wodehouse, who was interviewed in Paris shortly after the liberation by Edward Cussen, a former member of MI5’s legal department.
Wodehouse had become notorious for a series of radio talks that he had given over German radio. He had been placed under house arrest during the occupation and had unwisely agreed to broadcast to England. The result of Cussen’s interview with the author was a long statement describing in detail the events that led to the broadcasts, together with transcripts of the programmes themselves. It was decided that there were no grounds for prosecution, and Wodehouse promptly went to live in New York. It was a mistake that many were not prepared to forgive, and Wodehouse never returned to England.
Other British broadcasters on Nazi radio were less fortunate. The first to be arrested was John Amery, the black-sheep son of Leo Amery MP. Amery was intercepted by Italian partisans on 23 April 1945 whilst driving his Lancia Aprilia on the autostrada between Milan and Como. He was interned at the Tierney Internment Camp near Rome, where he was interviewed in May by Len Burt of MI5’s ‘B’ Division.3 Amery returned to London to face capital charges and, in November the following year, pleaded guilty to them. The judge, Mr Justice Humphreys, immediately questioned Amery’s Counsel, Gerald Slade QC, to establish if the prisoner realized the consequences of his plea. Informed that he did indeed, Humphreys placed the black cap on his head and sentenced Amery to death. He was hanged at Wandsworth on 19 December 1945.
Amery’s case had taken a long time to get to the Old Bailey, and in the meantime a second Nazi broadcaster, the equally notorious William Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, was arrested, tried and executed.
Joyce was caught attempting to cross the German frontier into Denmark near Wassersleben on 28 May 1945. He was challenged by a British officer, Captain A.A. Lickorish, who thought he recognized Joyce’s familiar voice even though only a few words had been exchanged, and those had been in French. Joyce promptly put his hand into his coat pocket to retrieve his papers (which identified him as ‘Fritz Hansen’), but Lickorish’s companion, an interpreter, misunderstood Joyce’s sudden move and, thinking Joyce was reaching for a gun, shot him in the thigh. The wretched Lord Haw-Haw was taken to 2nd Army headquarters at Lüneburg for formal identification and interrogation by Jim Skardon of B2(a). On 16 June 1945 Joyce was flown back to London and appeared in the dock at the Old Bailey two months later. The trial lasted three days, at the end of which he was sentenced to hang. His appeal was dismissed on 18 December, and he climbed the scaffold at Wandsworth on 3 January 1946.
Norman Baillie Stewart, the celebrated ‘prisoner-in-the-Tower’ who had been court-martialled, cashiered and imprisoned in 1933, was next. He was arrested in May 1945 by American Counter-Intelligence Corps officers in Ault Aussee, Austria, who had used him as their interpreter. Baillie Stewart was transferred to a gaol in Brussels before being flown to England, late in 1945, to face triad on charges of treason at the Old Bailey. A search of his rooms in Austria however, by Reginald Spooner of MI5, established that the former Seaforth Highlander had changed his nationality in 1939, and he was therefore only found guilty of an infringement of the wartime Defence Regulations, a much lesser offence and one that did not carry a capital sentence. Baillie Stewart was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by Mr Justice Oliver on 10 January 1946.
There were many other similar ‘turncoat’ cases, many of whom had joined the Legion of St George, the so-called British Free Corps which had recruited British prisoners of war in Germany for service in an SS regiment on the Russian front. In fact none of the members, who volunteered after having met John Amery, actually saw any action beyond that found during numerous visits to SS brothels.
While MI5 liaison staff were sifting through the abandoned Nazi files, the French, Dutch and Norwegians were conducting post mortems into the wartime behaviour of certain of their countrymen. In France, where collaboration was widespread, especially amongst the civil police, the Direction de Surveillance du Territoire initiated a detailed investigation into those Resistance cells which had been penetrated by the Germans. Frenchmen suspected of betrayals were detained in the old Gestapo headquarters in the Rue de Saussaies and interrogated. Several interrogations confirmed the suspected guilt of an Englishman, Harold Cole, of complicity in the betrayal of Resistance networks.
Sergeant Harold Cole had deserted with funds from the Sergeant’s Mess in the spring of 1940, when serving with the British Expeditionary Force in France. By December 1941 he had been arrested by the Brussels Abstelle and ‘turned’; thereafter he had posed as a British escapee, denouncing each of his helpers as he passed down the PAT escape line which ran from Belgium, through occupied France over the Pyrenees. In 1942, having promoted himself to Captain, Cole infiltrated the PAT escape line again and effectively closed it down. After the war it was estimated that he had caused some 150 people to be arrested, of whom a large number had been tortured, and fifty had been known to have been killed. The French put a price on his head, as did MI9, the escape and evasion service, but he was not apprehended until late in the summer of 1945, when he was found in southern Germany, calling himself Captain Paul Mason and making himself indispensable to the American occupation forces. Soon after his arrest he was interviewed by Peter Hope of MI5, who had him returned to Paris for interrogation.
Cole, however, was an experienced survivor and, donning a convenient US Army tunic, escaped from custody. Some time later he was challenged in the Rue de Grenelle by two Gendarmes who suspected him of being a deserter. Cole drew a revolver and wounded one of them. The other returned his fire and shot Cole dead.
Cole was subsequently described by Reg Spooner of MI5 as the worst traitor of the war, 4
When Clement Attlee came to power he learned from the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, that the future of both MI5 and MI6 were under review by Sir Findlater Stewart, the Chairman of the wartime Home Defence Executive. Stewart, assisted by John Drew, took evidence from MI5, MI6 and a host of other wartime secret departments, and concluded in his secret report dated 27 November 1945 that Britain should retain its two separate intelligence organizations: MI6 for intelligence gathering abroad and MI5 for security at home. Most of Sir Findlater’s attention was taken up by MI6, so that MI5 escaped detailed internal reorganization until 1953, but what Stewart did say about MI5 was:
The purpose of the Security Service is the Defence of the Realm and nothing else. It follows that the minister responsible for it as a service should be the Minister of Defence, or, if there is no Minister of Defence, the Prime Minister, as Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence. It had been argued that this would place an undue burden upon the Minister of Defence or Prime Minister, and upon the staff of the Cabinet Secretariat. But from the very nature of the work, need for direction except on the very broadest lines can never arise above the level of Director-General. That appointment is one of great responsibility, calling for unusual experience and a rare combination of qualities; but having got the right man there is no alternative to giving him the wildest discretion in the means he uses to and the direction in which he applies them—always provided he does not step outside the law.
It was an extremely apposite comment for Sir David Petrie was sixty-six and his successor had now to be chosen. Petrie's Deputy D-G, Jasper Harker, was only fifty-four, but his performance as Acting D-G during the crucial interregnum of Kell's departure and Petrie's appointment had been less than impressive. Those vital summer months of 1940 had proved that although Harker was a good administrator and socially very amiable, he was quite unable to provide leadership.
The next most senior officer was Guy Liddell, a veteran MI5 man whom Harker had appointed Director of ‘B' Division in June 1940. Traditionally ‘B' Division was the most senior branch of MI5 and so its head could hope for higher office, but Liddell was not considered a likely candidate for the very top although he was a possible deputy.
Guy Liddell's intelligence experience dated back to 1919 and his wartime record in MI5 had been exceptional. He had encouraged the formation of the double-agent exercise known as the double-cross system5 and had taken an active interest in the developments made by the Radio Security Service. He was without question a brilliant intelligence officer, and he had recruited a number of outstanding brains into the office during the first twelve months of the war. But he had a regrettable choice in friends and was known to prefer the company of homosexuals, although he himself was not one. Long after the war he invariably spent Friday evenings at the Chelsea Palais, a well-known haunt of homosexuals.
If the general election of October 1945 had not elected a Labour administration it is arguable that Liddell might have been chosen to succeed Petrie, but with Attlee in Downing Street such a thing was impossible. Attlee, like most of his colleagues in the Labour Party, had deep reservations about the Security Service, probably (and understandably) fostered by the suspicion that MI5 had played a major role in the Zinoviev Letter scandal of 1924 which ensured a Tory victory at the polls the same year. Attlee did not feel he would be able to trust an internal candidate so he chose a reliable outsider, a police officer called Percy Sillitoe, to head the Security Service.
* * *
Footnotes
1 - Later Labour MP for Rutherglen Division at the 1945 general election when Alex Kellar succeeded him.
2 - Later Lord Clanmorris.
3 - Later Commander of Special Branch, 1946-58.
4 - Iain Garrow, The Great Detective (Frederick Muller, 1966).
5 - See J.C. Masterman’s The Double Cross System in the War of 1939-1945 (Yale University Press, 1972).
2
SIR PERCY SILLITOE
I had always found it difficult to get down to facts with my MI5 colleagues. There was so much secrecy within secrecy. My colleagues were charming and amiable, conscientious and erudite, but sometimes when I was talking to one of them a glazed expression would come over his face; and I would try and make up my mind whether he was hiding information from me or whether he felt at a disadvantage because I had shown I knew more than he did. And on occasions I felt like a small boy unwillingly let into a prefects’ pow wow . . . for a sudden change of subject would take place just when I was beginning to be interested.
This appraisal was written by Derek Tangye1 who served in MI5 from June 1940 to February 1950. It catches the flavour of caution and secrecy necessary even between colleagues. One of the more depressing aspects about working in the Security Service was the need to guard your tongue all the time, to talk to no one, to tell no one what you did, not even your wife. It encouraged the recruitment of rugged, independent originals. To lead such a team required equal strength of character.
In the foreword to Sillitoe’s autobiography,2 Attlee wrote:
A Director-General of MI5 needs very special qualities. He has to have the technical qualities required for intelligence work. He must be able to control a team of individualists engaged on important secret work. At the same time he has to have a very lively appreciation of the rights of the citizen in a free country.
Sillitoe’s previous experience was limited to regular police work. He had originally joined the South African police in 1908 and, three years later, had transferred to the Northern Rhodesia police. He had remained in East Africa until 1923 when he had been appointed Chief Constable of Chesterfield. He had subsequently held posts in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Sheffield and Glasgow before moving to the Kent Constabulary in April 1943.
Sillitoe’s appointment as Director-General of the Security Service, which he took up on 30 April 1946, heralded a number of changes within MI5. The Deputy D-G, Jasper Harker, retired the following year, aged fifty-seven, and Guy Liddell was moved up to take his place. The prospect of having to work with ‘a rozzer at the top’ was simply too much to bear for some of ‘B? Division’s remaining staff. One officer with strong feelings on the subject was the head of Bl(a), Colonel Tar Robertson. He resigned in protest and went to work for the Government Communications Headquarters at Eastcote. Liddell’s as sistant Dick White moved up to be the new Director of ‘B’ Division. White was later to consider resigning because of his frustration with Sillitoe, whom he thought supremely ignorant of intelligence matters.
When Sillitoe took over the Director-General’s office in Leconfield House, overlooking South Audley Street, he found two major investigations in progress. Both were to have immense repercussions.
The first investigation had in fact been progressing since 5 September 1945 when a twenty-six-year-old Soviet cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko failed in his attempt to sell his story to the Ottawa Journal. The newspaper thought he was a crank and suggested he go to the police. The following day Gouzenko and his pregnant wife tried to get an interview with the Canadian Minister of Justice, but were turned away. He was finally taken seriously when two Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) constables were called to Gouzehko’s apartment, where the Soviet Assistant Military Attaché and three Embassy colleagues were found to be smashing down the door.
As it happened, most unusually, news of this none-too-remarkable event went to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) first. Under normal circumstances it would have been relayed instantly to the MI5 representative in Ottawa, Cyril Mills, but Mills was on his way back to England to be demobbed. In his absence the message went to the British Embassy in Washington, where it was received by Peter Dwyer, an MI6 officer. At the moment of its arrival Dwyer was representing MI5 in the American capital as well as his own organization.3
Dwyer promptly sent a coded message to MI6, London, where it was channelled to the desk of the head of Section IX, the Soviet department, H.A.R. (Kim) Philby. When it arrived Philby was in fact wrestling with another, similar problem in Istanbul. An apparently well-informed Soviet NKVD officer, Konstantin Volkov, had announced his intention to defect and had offered the names of some Soviet agents in England as an inducement for protection and help. The British Consulate-General sought London’s advice, and the MI6 Chief, Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies, handed the case over to Philby. Philby was aghast at the prospect of being denounced and made plans to travel to Turkey immediately. Just as he was about to leave the Gouzenko telegram arrived.
Philby was quite unable to handle both cases, so he sent the Gouzenko file to his opposite number at MI5, the Director of ‘F* Division, Roger Hollis. The way in which this transfer took place was to become a matter of considerable importance some years later. Philby went to see Menzies and obtained his approval for the Gouzenko case to be handed over to MI5. Philby then sent a demi-official letter to Hollis stating that the case was rather more his province than Philby’s. That letter was to remain on Gouzenko’s MI5 personal file and later cause much debate.
