Secret Alliances Read online

  “A fascinating and novel insight into British intelligence and special operations in wartime Norway. Among a number of important new sources, Tony Insall has discovered in Oslo top-secret SIS files which are unavailable in Britain.”

  PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER ANDREW, FOUNDER OF CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR AND AUTHOR OF THE SECRET WORLD: A HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE

  “Secret Alliances shines a light on a fascinating but little-known part of the war. Filled with new details and insight, it brings to life the drama of special operations and intelligence work in Norway, including the extent of SIS coast-watching, which provided significant coverage of the German fleet, especially the Tirpitz.”

  GORDON CORERA, BROADCASTER AND AUTHOR OF MI6: LIFE AND DEATH IN THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE

  “This is a beautifully detailed account that brings to life the extraordinary story of the Norwegian resistance. So many played their part – kings, prime ministers, traitors like Kim Philby – but mostly this is a tale of bloody-minded determination on the part of unsung heroes. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this vital period of Norwegian history.”

  MICHAEL DOBBS

  “Secret Alliances is a gripping history of wide-ranging Anglo-Norwegian wartime cooperation, spiced with vivid stories of heroism and betrayal. Tony Insall makes unprecedented use of British and Norwegian archives to present a detailed picture of resistance operations in Norway, and also explains the political context that facilitated what was perhaps the most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe.”

  PROFESSOR PATRICK SALMON, CHIEF HISTORIAN, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE

  “The most detailed and comprehensive study of wartime clandestine operations conducted in Norway yet published. Highly readable and thoroughly researched.”

  NIGEL WEST, INTELLIGENCE HISTORIAN

  “A gripping account of Anglo-Norwegian cooperation in the heroic struggle against German occupation.”

  ANDY MCNAB

  “Some of the most important links between Britain and Norway during WWII were welded through the vast and varied numbers of clandestine operations undertaken by SOE and SIS. Here, Tony Insall describes these activities against the complex political backdrop – whilst drawing upon a thorough understanding of Norway – to add considerably to our knowledge on the subject.”

  IVAR KRAGLUND, NORWAY’S RESISTANCE MUSEUM

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Abbreviations

  Maps

  Chapter 1 AN INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 2 THE RESISTANCE BEGINS

  9 April 1940: German invasion

  Chapter 3 ‘DANGEROUS RIVALS’

  SIS and SOE: did their differences damage operations in Norway?

  Chapter 4 CRACKING ABWEHR CODES

  How Bletchley Park made the breakthrough

  Chapter 5 GERMAN SUCCESS, NEAR MISSES AND FAILURES

  Abwehr espionage: agents, double agents and Double-Cross

  Chapter 6 SECRET ALLIANCES TAKE EFFECT

  1941–1942: creating a productive relationship

  Chapter 7 SOE’S SUCCESSES AND SETBACKS

  Operations and problems 1941–1943

  Chapter 8 THE SIS COAST-WATCHERS

  Development of naval coverage

  Chapter 9 OPERATIONS FRESHMAN AND GUNNERSIDE

  Attempts to destroy the heavy water plant at Vemork

  Chapter 10 THE TIDE STARTS TO TURN

  1943–1944: preparations for liberation

  Chapter 11 HUNTING DOWN THE TIRPITZ

  Churchill’s obsession

  Chapter 12 SOE SABOTAGE AND DISRUPTING THE U-BOATS

  1944: diversification of operations

  Chapter 13 ‘LUKKET PÅ GRUNN AV GLEDE’

  ‘Closed because of joy’ – the final steps to freedom

  Chapter 14 RETRIBUTION, RECOGNITION AND COMPENSATION

  The aftermath

  Appendix: DSO CITATIONS FOR BJØRN RØRHOLT AND TORSTEIN RAABY

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

  ANCC Anglo-Norwegian Collaboration Committee

  BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

  BSS Bayswater Security Section of SOE

  C or CSS Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service SIS

  CCO Chief of Combined Operations

  CCS Combined Chiefs of Staff

  CO Combined Operations

  COHQ Combined Operations Headquarters

  COS Chiefs of Staff

  COSSAC Chief of Staff Supreme Allied Commander

  D Sabotage Section of SIS

  DCO Directorate of Combined Operations

  DDNI Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence

  DMI Director of Military Intelligence

  DNA Det Norske Arbeiderpartiet (the Norwegian Labour Party)

  DNI Director of Naval Intelligence

  DSIR Department for Scientific and Industrial Research

  FO Forsvarets Overkommando (Norwegian Defence High Command)

  FO.II Norwegian Intelligence Office

  FO.IV The office responsible for resistance and military operations in Norway

  GC&CS Government Code and Cypher School

  GRU Main Intelligence Directorate (Russian Military Intelligence Service)

  ISK Illicit Signals Knox

  ISOS Illicit Signals Oliver Strachey

  JIC Joint Intelligence Committee

  LO Landsorganisasjonen i Norge (the Norwegian equivalent of the TUC)

  MEW Ministry of Economic Warfare

  MI1c An early name for the Secret Intelligence Service

  MI5 Security Service

  MI6 Another name for the Secret Intelligence Service

  MI.II Norwegian intelligence office in Stockholm

  MILORG Norwegian military resistance organisation

  MI(R) Military Intelligence Section for Irregular Warfare

  NID Naval Intelligence Division

  NKVD People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Russia’s intelligence service)

  NOK Norwegian kroner

  NS Nasjonal Samling

  OIC Operational Intelligence Centre

  POW Prisoner of War

  RVPS Royal Victoria Patriotic School

  SD Sicherheitsdienst (the Nazi Party’s intelligence service)

  SF HQ Special Forces headquarters

  SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

  SIS Secret Intelligence Service

  SEK Swedish kroner

  SOE Special Operations Executive

  STAPO Norwegian NS secret police

  USAAF American Air Force

  W/T Wireless transmitter

  XU Norwegian resistance intelligence organisation

  CHAPTER 1

  AN INTRODUCTION

  For five years we have worked together, in conditions which have sometimes been difficult. But I should like to say that we have had no allies, however powerful, with whom it has been a greater privilege to work than our friends from Norway. They have responded to every call – often heavy calls – which we have had to make upon them.1

  Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, paid this compliment to his guests at a farewell lunch which he hosted for members of the Norwegian government on 23 May 1945, as they prepared to return to Oslo and to a country liberated after five years of German occupation. The euphoric occasion marked a stark contrast with the circumstances of their arrival in June 1940. How was this change achieved?

  When King Haakon and most of his government reached Britain on Devonshire in early June 1940, the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk had just been completed and the outlook was very uncertain. Halfway through
the Norwegian campaign, following growing dissatisfaction with its handling, Neville Chamberlain lost the support of many Conservative MPs in a confidence vote in Parliament. He was replaced as Prime Minister by Winston Churchill. British attention was focused mainly on the possible threats of a German invasion and the fall of France, so initially there was little time to spare for the Norwegian exiles. Moreover, arriving in what was for many of them an alien land, the Norwegians were ill-equipped to establish themselves and work out what they wished to do or where to do it, and even whether to remain in Britain or to move to somewhere safer, such as Canada. The British minister to Norway, Cecil Dormer,* had offered the well-meaning but impractical suggestion that they should consider setting up their administration either in Cornwall or the west coast of Scotland, and the Foreign Office offered to arrange accommodation for them in Exeter. The Norwegian Prime Minister, Johan Nygaardsvold, decided to settle in London to begin with, but left open the possibility of moving elsewhere if German bombing made this too dangerous.

  The Norwegians were bitterly disappointed by the lack of support they considered that they had received from the British during the Norwegian campaign. Feeling powerless and lacking all but the most intermittent contact with Norway, they had no realistic option but to accept an alliance with Britain. Nonetheless, there were differences of opinion over what the nature of that alliance should be. Halvdan Koht, the Foreign Minister who had been a strong advocate of Norwegian neutrality – and who had been unwilling to accept and act on growing evidence in early April 1940 which pointed to an imminent German invasion – wanted to limit the new relationship with Britain to practical cooperation without any political commitments. (Perhaps he was still affected by the memory of the boarding of the Altmark by the Royal Navy in Jøssingfjord in early 1940, leading to the release of 299 British prisoners, which was a significant violation of Norwegian sovereignty.) Moreover, he preferred not to live or work in London, but settled in Bracknell, some 30 miles west of London, which created further difficulties for the limited staff of his Foreign Ministry who were initially obliged to work there. And to compound the problems faced by the government, quite a few ministers spoke little or no English and needed to have language lessons.2

  It would not be an easy process for the Norwegians to resolve their main internal differences and to start to establish closer political and military relations with the British. Their initial numbers were small, and they lacked organisation. Moreover, on the military side, the British were looking not just to develop resistance operations, but also to retain control of them. So they preferred to recruit and train Norwegians themselves, with as little interference as possible. Their insistence on high levels of restrictive security also meant that they did not want to disclose in advance their plans for operations on the Norwegian mainland. Not exactly a promising position for the Norwegians to start from. How did they set about it, and achieve the relationship – crucial to the development of the resistance movement – which Eden later described in such glowing terms?

  A new appraisal

  Much has been written – and continues to be written – by Norwegian authors about the German occupation and Norwegian resistance. There has been very little from the British side. The most recent book which provides a comprehensive account of this subject is a collection of papers presented at a colloquium in Oxford in 1991 by British and Norwegian academics together with some of those who had taken part in the resistance.3 We can now add significantly to that picture. In recent years, there has been a wealth of new material released to the National Archives in Kew describing the work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) responsible for sabotage and subversion, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and the Security Service, all of which played significant roles in supporting the Norwegian resistance. The papers now available in the HS series of the archive give new insights into many of the major SOE operations in Norway, including the well-known attack on the heavy water plant at Vemork and the ill-fated Operation MARTIN where only one man, Jan Baalsrud, survived after enduring the most extraordinary hardships. GC&CS made good use of intelligence obtained during raids on Norway to develop its knowledge of German codes and to break many of them. The files show the extent to which Combined Operations raids mounted on the Norwegian coast also had the objective of obtaining German cypher equipment and codes. This greatly assisted GC&CS in decyphering Abwehr (German military intelligence) traffic. It enabled the Security Service to arrest a good number of the Norwegians whom the Abwehr sent to Britain, although intelligence from other sources, particularly the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), was also crucial. Security Service files show how much the Germans used Norway as a base to try to infiltrate their agents into Britain, especially in the early part of the war. They mounted nearly twenty operations from there, including one with limited success and another which came very close to succeeding. In addition, one Norwegian only escaped a treason trial (where he would certainly have been found guilty and hanged) because of procedural errors during his interrogation, and another managed to commit suicide soon after he had been detained and confronted with the extensive evidence against him. There are also new documents in other series covering the Prime Minister’s activities and the Cabinet Office, as well as Foreign Office files.

  Some of the recently released material also touches on the role of SIS, whose archives have not been released in Britain – and there is plenty more about their activities available on other files, particularly those of the Naval Intelligence Division in the Admiralty (ADM) series. These include, for example, the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) citations for two of SIS’s star agents in Norway, Bjørn Rørholt and Torstein Raaby, which provide comprehensive accounts of their activities.† However, the Norwegian SIS archive is available to researchers in Oslo, as is their SOE archive. The SIS archive is not quite complete. It contains more information on operations than it does on policy matters, which the British would not necessarily have shared with their Norwegian counterparts. Nonetheless, it complements significantly our knowledge of their Norwegian work, which concentrated on coast-watching stations providing intelligence about German naval and merchant shipping movements. The SOE archives in London and in Oslo are not complete either. The British archive lacks documents which were destroyed after the war and later because of a lack of space, though fire may have destroyed some as well.‡ The Norwegian archive also lacks policy documents. These omissions have led to a few gaps. For example, the SOE Norwegian section history contains a brief reference to the unsuccessful attempt in March 1941 to assassinate Himmler during his visit to Oslo, but there are no further details elsewhere. (We will look at this in more detail in Chapter 2.) However, they do not significantly affect the overall picture which is presented here.

  It has also been possible to draw on some material obtained from the archives of the Russian intelligence service, then known as the NKVD, in Moscow. These are handwritten documents from Kim Philby, the SIS officer who was a Soviet spy who spent part of the war working in the SIS counter-intelligence section. They provide evidence of an Abwehr agent in Norway with whom SIS was in touch throughout the German occupation.

  Drawing on this new material the book sets out to provide, from the British perspective, a reappraisal of resistance activities in occupied Norway. It will describe how, initially, with approval from the Norwegian government, both SIS and SOE carried out their operations quite independently. These methods did not always prove successful, especially when things went as wrong as they did after the second Lofoten raid and the death of Martin Linge, the charismatic leader of the Norwegian group working with SOE. This led to some serious disagreements, but effective changes were made which led to closer cooperation. The Norwegians set up a new command structure under General Hansteen with separate offices working as closely as possible with their British Allies. SIS liaised with FO.II (the Norwegian intelligence office) and, together with them, also provided support to XU, a home-grown Norwegian intel
ligence organisation. After a bumpy start, SOE developed an effective partnership with FO.IV (the office responsible for resistance and military operations in Norway) and Milorg, the military resistance movement in Norway. The establishment of the Anglo-Norwegian Collaboration Committee (ANCC) provided an effective means of sharing information and consultation about SOE operations. Still better, SOE and FO.IV were eventually co-located in 1944 and shared offices. While Norwegian ministers were not directly involved, they were kept closely informed about what became increasingly joint activities. This, and their pragmatism, enabled them to be both stoical and supportive when things went wrong, as they inevitably did sometimes, and there were German reprisals. These attitudes were also reflected in their relations with other British government departments, especially the Foreign Office, which enabled frank exchanges and generally satisfactory results.

  The book will not attempt to describe the purely military aspects, particularly the campaign between April and June 1940 which has been well described elsewhere – although it will consider the intelligence available beforehand, and why it was misinterpreted or ignored. Nor will it explore in much detail the naval or commando raids on the Norwegian coast, except insofar as the latter provided opportunities for the discreet acquisition of German cyphers or led to bilateral problems. But it will examine the political links which were developed after a beginning in such unpromising circumstances and which supported resistance activities. The Norwegians were one among many exiled governments trying to establish themselves in London in the summer of 1940. What did they have to offer to help build up their relations, and how did they capitalise on their advantages?

  Norwegian assets

  By far the most important Norwegian contribution to Britain was the provision of a large part of its extensive merchant fleet. Given the income-earning potential of the merchant marine and its value to the Norwegian economy, it was never likely to be a straightforward matter for the two sides to negotiate agreements (for there were several) which met desperate British needs for tonnage at times when the Germans had sunk considerable numbers of ships crucial to the continued supply of vital war materials across the Atlantic, while also meeting Norwegian concerns to retain a degree of independence, to protect their post-war interests and to earn a reasonable income from their charters, especially in dollars. Not surprisingly given both the importance of these interests, and the strong characters of those involved in the negotiations and also within Nortraship (the Norwegian organisation administering the fleet), negotiations were never easy. Nortraship was controlled by the government but run by ship owners: it had two main offices in London and New York which frequently had conflicting interests. In the course of the war, the fleet lost nearly 2,000,000 tons of its ships, as well as more than 3,200 seamen and passengers. In addition, in the period before the German invasion, there had also been a further loss of more than 100,000 tons of shipping and nearly 400 seamen from vessels which had been chartered to Britain. There had already been discussions about a shipping agreement and in November 1939 one was signed which made available to Britain 150 large tankers – a critically important benefit.