Secret Service Against the Nazi Regime: How Our Spies Dealt with Hitler

By Edward Harrison

An edited collection of peer-reviewed articles using newly-released sources - British, German and Italian - integrated to form a fascinating narrative of the intelligence-led fight of the British Secret Service in the existential struggle with Nazi Germany. The main sections are: British Secret Warfare and the Nazi Challenge; Counter-Intelligence Against Axis Spies; and Hugh Trevor-Roper and Secret Service. An inside and authentic story with original and little-known but vital themes including the British Military Mission to Poland, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Poland, British subversion in French East Africa, 'on secret service for the Duce', British Radio Intelligence, and J C Masterman and the Security Service. This is a uniquely human story of survival with all the drama of power struggles, personality clashes, errors, heroism, human intelligence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399007283

Book preview

SECRET SERVICE

AGAINST THE

NAZI REGIME

SECRET SERVICE GAINST THE NAZI REGIME

HOW OUR SPIES DEALT WITH HITLER

EDWARD HARRISON

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

PEN AND SWORD MILITARY

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Limited

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Edward Harrison, 2022

ISBN 978 1 39900 727 6

eISBN 978 1 39900 728 3

The right of Edward Harrison to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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In memory of Edward Lawrence Harrison,

RAF Intelligence Burma 1943–45

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and Glossary

Introduction

Chapter 1 The British Military Mission to Poland in 1939

Chapter 2 The Special Operations Executive and Poland

Chapter 3 British Subversion in French East Africa, 1941–42

Chapter 4 On Secret Service for the Duce, 1941–43

Chapter 5 British Radio Security and Intelligence, 1939–43

Chapter 6 J.C. Masterman and the Security Service, 1940–72

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

The chapters in this book were first published separately in academic journals. I would like to thank those who edited the original essays, namely George Bernard [two], Peter Jackson, Francis King, J.R. Maddicott, and Jonathan Steinberg. Wise comment on the final text was provided by Jack Spence and Martin Thomas as referees for the project.

I should also mention those who provided decisive help in the writing of the articles. When I was beginning research on intelligence, Richard J. Aldrich generously pointed me towards the SOE files in the National Archives. Duncan Stuart, the SOE Adviser, was also very supportive. The late M.R.D. Foot was the referee for both my essays on SOE and offered much encouragement and advice of lasting value. Mark Seaman was also most helpful. The late Fergus Sutherland encouraged my interest in General Carton de Wiart. Blair Worden gave invaluable guidance as Literary Executor to Lord Dacre of Glanton [Hugh Trevor-Roper], and Judith Curthoys was exceptionally helpful as archivist of the Dacre Papers at Christ Church Oxford. Edward Wilson courageously gave me permission for the first study of J. C. Masterman’s papers on MI5.

At Pen and Sword, I would particularly like to thank Lester Crook, who guided and encouraged this project with exemplary enthusiasm, and Charles Hewitt, who gave invaluable advice after realizing that my material comprised two books, not just one! A second volume, Hitler’s Traitors, consists of articles on Nazi Germany and will be published subsequently. Also at Pen and Sword, Harriet Fielding gave generous help at every stage and guided the production of the book with meticulous skill while Paul Middleton was a most thoughtful copy-editor. Richard Munro expertly compiled the index.

The six essays included in this volume were originally published as follows:

‘Carton de Wiart’s Second Military Mission to Poland and the German Invasion of 1939’, European History Quarterly vol. 41/4 (Oct. 2011) pp. 609–33.

‘The British special operations executive and Poland’, The Historical Journal Vol. 43/4 (Dec. 2000) pp. 1071–91.

‘British Subversion in French East Africa, 1941–42: SOE’s Todd Mission’, English Historical Review Vol. CXIV/456 (April 1999) pp. 339–69.

‘On Secret Service for the Duce: Umberto Campini in Portuguese East Africa, 1941–43’, English Historical Review vol. cxxii/499 (Dec. 2007) pp. 1318–49.

‘British Radio Security and Intelligence, 1939–43’, English Historical Review Vol. CXXIV/506 (Feb. 2009) pp. 53–93.

‘J.C. Masterman and the Security Service, 1940-72’, Intelligence and National Security vol. 24/6 (Dec. 2009) pp.769-804. This article is reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor and Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com).

I would also like to thank The English Historical Review, The European History Quarterly and The Historical Journal for kind permission to republish articles which first appeared in their pages.

Edward D.R. Harrison

Abbreviations and Glossary

Relating to the United Kingdom unless otherwise indicated

Introduction

For most of the twentieth century historians in the United Kingdom were starved of documents about security and intelligence. Far from transferring their records to the public archives, officially the British secret services did not exist. But the end of the Cold War brought drastic changes. The British intelligence services were acknowledged by parliamentary legislation and very large quantities of official files relating to British code-breaking, the Special Operations Executive [SOE], and the Security Service [MI5] were made available to the public. Although the Secret Intelligence Service [SIS or MI6] did not open its records, some of its former officers arranged to release theirs. In particular, the remarkable private collections of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Oxford historian, and Sir Patrick Reilly, a former ambassador to France, both became available. Trevor-Roper and Reilly had worked in the wartime SIS and later wrote detailed unpublished memoirs and corresponded widely about their clandestine experience.

Unprecedented access to documents has made the recent past a golden age for British historians studying the secret world. The essays in this collection draw heavily on the extensive new releases to the archives. The book begins with a study of the British Military Mission to Poland in 1939, which resulted in the first official British assessment of the Nazi Blitzkrieg methods that made possible Germany’s early successes. The Mission identified the significance of tank formations and low-flying bombers but failed to appreciate the barbarism of Hitler’s warfare. The British Military Mission used SIS wireless links to provide excellent information to the War Office in London, but was unable to persuade the British Government to give effective assistance to the Poles.

The Military Mission’s Chief of Staff, Colin Gubbins, was later recruited by SOE to co-ordinate British support to the Polish Resistance, the subject of the second essay. There were many misunderstandings on both sides. In particular, the Polish Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising unaware how difficult it would be to support the city from the air. Although Churchill and some SOE officers strove vigorously to provide the Poles with desperately needed supplies, Gubbins himself played a surprisingly small part in supporting the Poles in August 1944. The Uprising was essentially a rerun of the events of 1939, when Nazi military power and Soviet treachery destroyed courageous Polish forces naively expecting help from impotent Western allies.

SOE records are particularly revealing. The astonishing bundles of dishevelled papers, often packed with dramatic and unsparing reports from the field, would grip the attention of any military historian. SOE officers were not usually intelligence professionals but wartime volunteers, patriotic men and women in a hurry, determined to sweep aside bureaucratic obstacles to their operations. SOE staff sometimes lacked the habits of security, and often proved quite uninhibited in their complaints about other secret services. Scattered around the globe, they reported extensively to London on their troubles and triumphs. Their files also include some SIS memoranda and details of joint operations. Although many SOE records were destroyed, those that remain offer a fascinating record of British special operations.

Unlike SOE’s role in Poland, its work in French East Africa, the subject of the third essay, was long kept secret. By spring 1942 French East Africa [Madagascar] had become of primary strategic importance. The Japanese had captured Singapore and Burma: their German allies now urged them to seize French East Africa as well. The capture of Madagascar would split the British Empire in two and enable a catastrophic defeat for Britain in the Middle East. Churchill opted for a pre-emptive strike against Madagascar, whose capital Diego Suarez, the best harbour in the Indian Ocean, became the target of an operation led by the Royal Navy. SOE played a crucial role in the capture of Diego Suarez. It provided a wide range of support, but perhaps most important was the work of its remarkable agent Percy Mayer, who supplied invaluable intelligence on the defenders and cut the communications of the French artillery.

The British capture of Diego Suarez was made possible by SOE’s direct action and intelligence work on the island. Britain took good advantage of the loyalty of its own citizens on Madagascar and also used French nationals hostile to the Vichy Government of Marshal Pétain. But in nearby Mozambique there was a greater threat from Axis spies. German and Italian intelligence were able to mount a clandestine challenge explored by the fourth essay in this collection, which draws on an exceptional range of British and international sources: relevant documents on secret service are available in British, American, German and Italian official archives, so the hand of every major player is visible.

By 1941 the Portuguese colony of Mozambique was ripe for an invasion of spies. Its coastal waters and Madagascar formed a bottleneck in which Axis submarines could prey on Allied vessels. In spring 1942 the Secret Intelligence Service [SIS] sent Malcolm Muggeridge to Mozambique with the remit of stopping the Axis spies who were believed to send information to the submarines. Muggeridge was working for Kim Philby, who told him to target the networks run by Umberto Campini, the Italian Consul, rather than those of the German secret service. Muggeridge, later the distinguished biographer of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, rattled Campini by kidnapping two of his most important agents. The remarkably complete documents on the intelligence war in Mozambique suggest Allied Counter-Intelligence got the better of its Axis adversaries.

SIS not only organized British counter-espionage overseas, during the war it also became responsible for detecting clandestine wireless messages to enemy agents. The interception of hostile secret wireless was carried out by part of SIS called the Radio Security Service, perhaps the least-known component of wartime British Intelligence. The fifth essay in this collection is the first academic study to examine the achievements of RSS. This article draws on a wide range of new secret service documents, in particular the files of RSS itself and those of MI5, which include the remarkably detailed diaries of Guy Liddell, the head of its spy-catching department. Liddell’s diaries provide a vivid account of the issues and personalities within British counter-espionage and often mention Trevor-Roper, the intellectual inspiration behind RSS.

The Radio Security Service achieved prodigious success, intercepting more than a quarter of a million German spy messages. Trevor-Roper derived intelligence from the technical features of these messages and of course from their content. When he and his small team discovered new German spy targets and methods, Trevor-Roper wanted their reports distributed extensively within British Intelligence. But his head of section Felix Cowgill fretted over security and tried to limit the circulation of Trevor-Roper’s material or indeed stop it altogether. Cowgill suspected some MI5 officers were careless and posed a risk to the security of British agents. So he deliberately withheld from MI5 thousands of messages potentially relevant to its work. This concealment is not mentioned in the centenary history commissioned by SIS. Certainly MI5’s Anthony Blunt was betraying ISOS, but his treason was matched by Cowgill’s closest colleague Kim Philby, who also fed everything he could to the Soviet Secret Service. Oblivious to the secret traitors, Cowgill raged at Trevor-Roper’s open defiance. Although the Admiralty in particular greatly appreciated Trevor-Roper’s material, much had to be passed surreptitiously under the table until he was finally given an autonomous section.

The career in MI5 of J.C. Masterman, Trevor-Roper’s history tutor, is the subject of the sixth essay. Masterman was an Oxford don who wrote detective stories and played an astonishing range of sports. In 1940 he joined the Security Service and became chairman of the Twenty Committee, which supervised the passing of misleading information to the Germans via double agents. After victory Masterman wrote an internal history of double-cross before returning to Oxford, where he became increasingly alarmed at the post-war mismanagement of MI5 under the leadership of the former policeman Percy Sillitoe. Masterman masterminded a campaign to prevent another policeman succeeding Sillitoe and instead made possible the appointment of his former pupil, Dick White. Yet White proved at best a lukewarm supporter of Masterman’s long-running attempts to publish his internal history. As the reputation of the British secret services deteriorated during the 1960s, Masterman believed that MI5 did not understand how his book could promote its interests, so he insisted on forcing through publication despite the opposition of the Security Service. He finally won qualified official approval for publication only after threatening to publish the book in the United States without permission. It was a remarkably successful piece of defiance by a life-long conformist. Masterman’s relationship with MI5 is of particular historical interest, not least because much of it is extremely well documented, with uniquely intimate detail on how senior alumni influenced the appointment of MI5’s Director General. Most of Masterman’s contact with serving and former MI5 officers was by letters, and both his own correspondence and the replies he received are to be found in his remarkable private papers.

All these essays were written in the excitement of discovering fresh material on some of the most intriguing aspects of the secret world. Together, the essays exploit a wide range of documentary evidence to show the initial fumbling and hesitancy of British Intelligence and its later success in fomenting action against the Nazis and in understanding these most baffling and terrible of opponents.

Chapter 1

The British Military Mission to Poland and the German Invasion in 1939

I

The Republic of Poland’s strategy for fighting Nazi Germany in 1939 has always been controversial. Was Poland’s decision to confront the invaders near her frontiers prudent, or would it have been better to keep the bulk of her forces much further back, allowing more protracted resistance? Not long after the campaign, General Neugebauer, head of the Polish Military Mission to Britain in 1939, asked:

Was abandonment of … territories, representing half of Poland both in area and population, possible to a nation that had recently been liberated from the German yoke? For all Poles there could only be one answer; and it was No. And this answer must suffice for the many military critics who … pointed to the inundations barrier formed by the Rivers Narew, Vistula, and San as a kind of Maginot Line.

But Neugebauer showed the extreme difficulty of the choice by conceding that ‘it would not have been any breach of military confidence to ask the opinion of certain representatives of the nation and receive assurance that the nation would decide to make the sacrifice even of a temporary evacuation of half the country in order to win the war. This … would have allowed the choice of a shorter and more convenient line of defence.’¹

The head of the British Military Mission to Poland in 1939, Major-General Adrian Carton de Wiart, strongly urged the Polish Commander-in-Chief not to engage the Wehrmacht near the frontiers. Carton de Wiart was a legendary figure in the British Army. He had run away from Oxford to take part in the Boer War. He later served in India, then campaigned against the Mad Mullah in Somaliland, was blinded in one eye and won the DSO. Despite losing a hand in the second battle of Ypres in 1915, de Wiart returned to the fray and won the VC at La Boisselle, hurling grenades at close quarters after drawing the pins with his teeth. Following the Armistice, his fluent French made him a natural choice for a role in the sudden expansion of diplomacy. In 1919 de Wiart was sent to Poland as head of the British Military Mission, and in 1939 was given the same post again, at a time when Britain was about to become Poland’s formal ally. This second military mission is therefore particularly significant. This article will explore the impact of Carton de Wiart’s second military mission on Anglo–Polish relations and British understanding of German warfare. Why was Carton de Wiart appointed head? How successful was he in supporting British policy, advising the Poles, getting them military assistance, and reporting on the campaign? Was he right to urge a defence in the interior, and how significant was his appraisal of the new German tactics?

The primary reason de Wiart was appointed head of the British Military Mission to Poland for a second time in 1939 was that he did it very well on the first occasion. In summer 1919 de Wiart was sent to Warsaw as head of a small British Military Mission because, as he was informed, ‘We thought you were the sort of man who would know that country.’² All foreign representatives in Warsaw faced two main difficulties. The first was building relationships with their Polish counterparts who tended to change frequently. The second was in getting reliable information. In January 1920 the British Minister in Poland, Sir Horace Rumbold, complained to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, that ‘my principal Allied colleagues … are unanimously of opinion that they have never in their experience served at a post at which it is so difficult either to obtain information or to arrive at the truth of what is going on.’ It was particularly difficult to make headway with the Polish leader Marshal Piłsudski, who made an unfortunate impression on some western statesmen. The French diplomat M. Berthelot thought Piłsudski ‘had a very furtive expression and seemed to be always expecting something unpleasant to happen to him’.³ On 25 July 1920 the French General Maxime Weygand had an interview with Piłsudski, but ‘the Marshal displayed a complete want of frankness and evinced no desire to take General Weygand into his confidence or to profit from his advice on military affairs.’ Major-General Sir Percy de B. Radcliffe, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, had two long talks with Piłsudski but like Weygand could not get close to the Polish leader: ‘a nature originally almost oriental in its secretiveness has, through a life spent in conspiracy and imprisonment, been hardened to a pitch which defies all attempts at gaining his confidence.’⁴

Carton de Wiart succeeded where the other western generals had failed. Through his remarkable military record and patent sympathy for Poland he was able to win Piłsudski’s confidence. The Polish leader talked to him without inhibition and so provided the best possible intelligence. De Wiart’s relationship with Piłsudski meant the British military representative could also speak frankly. On one occasion he reported: ‘I asked Piłsudski if he had ever thought of using force in the direction of Danzig. He merely laughed and said it had never even entered his head.’⁵ De Wiart’s information also reached London via the British Minister, for whom the General was a vital source of diplomatic information. When Rumbold had difficulty with Piłsudski he arranged for de Wiart to accompany him to see the Polish leader.⁶ Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, noted that ‘de Wiart is of the very greatest service to us at Warsaw.’ On 15 May Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Haking, Commander of Allied troops in East Prussia, told CIGS (Chief of Imperial General Staff) Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson that, ‘As regards his [de Wiart’s] work at Warsaw, he is the only man there who Piłsudski really pays attention to.’⁷ On 3 July 1920 the Director of Military Intelligence, Major-General Sir William Thwaites, complimented de Wiart on the quality of his material: ‘I cannot tell you how much your letters and reports are appreciated; they keep the situation before us in the clearest possible way, and are of immense interest to everyone.’⁸

The Red Army was the main threat to Poland during de Wiart’s first mission, but the Soviet Commander Marshal Tukachevsky hesitated when the Bolsheviks seemed poised to conquer the Polish heartland in the Vistula basin. Piłsudski approved a drastic redeployment of the Polish forces, which launched a counter-offensive on 16 August. One hundred thousand Russians were taken prisoner.⁹ On 25 August 1920 de Wiart recommended twelve Polish senior officers for awards, including Piłsudski and Generals Śmigły-Rydz and Sikorski. For his part de Wiart received a glowing tribute from Major-General Radcliffe, who mentioned:

the excellent work done throughout the operations – starting from the opening of the campaign in the spring – by General Carton de Wiart and his officers, who spent the whole of their time in the front line obtaining valuable information which could be obtained in no other way, and by their soldierly bearing and cheerful camaraderie affording much needed encouragement to the Polish troops. The heroic figure of General de Wiart … contributed greatly towards maintaining British Prestige.¹⁰

De Wiart enjoyed his time in Poland: ‘I like a good cheery war with the Bolo’ (Bolshevik), as he wrote to Anthony de Rothschild. So in the absence of an attractive army appointment he decided to remain in Poland indefinitely. On 24 September 1922 de Wiart told de Rothschild that ‘My job finishes 31st March [1923] but I will … [stay] here. It’s cheap and I can get lots of sport as I’ve been given a nice little shooting box in the wilds.’¹¹ The donor of this property was Prince Charles Radziwill, de Wiart’s former aide-de-camp, who had recently succeeded to the Dawidgródek entail, the second largest estate in interwar Poland. Radziwill installed de Wiart on the eastern edge of his half-million acres at Prostyń near the Polish–Soviet border. The Bolsheviks had murdered the uncle from whom Radziwill inherited. What better tripwire against this danger than a ferocious British general? De Wiart spent the next sixteen years despatching more than twenty thousand duck.¹²

II

After a period of political eclipse, de Wiart’s friend Piłsudski returned to power with a coup d’êtat in 1926. Despite his enthusiasm for the armed forces, Piłsudski’s influence was ambiguous. While he strengthened the position of Inspector General of the Armed Forces, who in wartime would become Commander in Chief, Piłsudski sent home a military mission from Poland’s ally France, which had provided training, and he neglected modernization of the armed forces. But he did clearly warn his successors of trouble to come, telling his closest colleagues on 7 March 1934 that he could not guarantee more than four years of peace with Germany.¹³ With Piłsudski’s death in 1935, the French High Command saw an opportunity to improve collaboration with Poland by working with General (later Marshal) Edward Śmigły-Rydz (hereafter Rydz), who had succeeded Piłsudski as Inspector General. General Maurice Gamelin believed Poland was the most significant of France’s eastern allies, with the fourth largest army in Europe. Rydz visited France in September 1936 and signed the Rambouillet agreement under which the French Government made available two billion francs of credit for weapons and armaments machine tools. But after Rambouillet Gamelin and his colleagues took their eyes off the ball, and did not check on Polish defence planning in 1937 and 1938.¹⁴

A Polish General Staff study at the turn of 1936 suggests its army had not changed markedly since de Wiart’s first military mission seventeen years before. Cavalry still made up more than 10 per cent of the strength. The infantry were poorly equipped and Poland had been slow to introduce tanks. Polish military doctrine did not see tanks as an independent weapon but rather as an auxiliary to infantry. As late as 1935 most Polish tanks were for scouting. Although Polish fighter planes of the early 1930s were excellent for their time, they soon became obsolete in comparison with the aircraft of the new German air force.¹⁵

By 1936 alarming intelligence on German rearmament prompted the Polish General Staff to prepare a plan for modernising the army and in particular its equipment. But although expenditure was substantial by Polish standards, it could not begin to match the sums Hitler was investing. The Polish defence budget from 1935 to 1939 was merely 10 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s spending for 1939 alone. By June 1939 a German division had three times the artillery firepower of its Polish counterpart. During the summer of 1939 the Poles tried desperately to get new equipment. They succeeded in getting one battalion of tanks from the French. On 13 June 1939 a Polish delegation arrived in London to negotiate an armaments loan. Previously Poland had been so short of foreign currency it was exporting anti-aircraft batteries from its factories in Poznań and Rzeszów to Britain. In July Poland was granted a modest credit of £8 million to be spent in the sterling area where little was available. The Poles needed cash credit to buy in the dollar area. The British Government would finally make cash available on 7 September 1939, the day the Wehrmacht announced it had taken Cracow.¹⁶

Poland’s strategic position had deteriorated significantly with the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The new Nazi satellite of Slovakia turned Poland’s flank in the south, and like East Prussia in the north, afforded Germany a base from which it could strike at Poland’s heart.¹⁷ From a practical point of view, therefore, it was not an obvious moment for a previously unsympathetic foreign power such as Great Britain suddenly to take sides with Poland. Anita J. Prazmowska writes that ‘there existed no trust, no unity of interest, in fact no common ground, between the Poles and the British prior to the March crisis.’ The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was greatly concerned about a possible German threat to Roumania and saw Poland as the lynchpin of eastern Europe. Approaches to the Soviet Union were shelved temporarily to appease Poland. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Halifax, ignored his military advisers and claimed that ‘if we had to make a choice between Poland and Soviet Russia it seemed clear that Poland would be the greater value.’ By 30 March Halifax feared a German attack on Poland. But the thought of a German–Polish agreement in which the Poles gave way to Hitler was just as alarming. The Poles should be stiffened. On 17 March Chamberlain had told Birmingham Conservatives that ‘I am not prepared to engage this country by new unspecified commitments.’ On