Secret Alliances Read online

  Shipping agreements brought the Norwegians the prospect of significant earnings which would be paid to them in London and ensure that the government remained solvent. But, in addition to that, as the result of a truly remarkable operation carried out by a small group of resourceful and determined Norwegians overseen by Nicolai Rygg, the director of Norges Bank, Norway was able to remove nearly 50 tons of gold bullion from its central bank and transfer it to England from under the noses of the occupying German forces. Their arrival in Oslo had fortuitously been delayed by the sinking of the Blücher as she led the invasion fleet up the Oslo Fjord.§ The Norwegian group, soldiers as well as a diverse group of enthusiastic volunteers who included such people as the poet Nordahl Grieg, moved the gold out of Oslo on 9 April, the day of the invasion. It was transported by lorry and railway on a tortuous journey, carefully concealed from the Germans who were known to be searching for it. The consignment was eventually divided into three parts, which were loaded onto British naval warships in Åndalsnes and Tromsø. It arrived almost intact in Britain – ‘almost’ intact because a bag of gold coins had been removed by a sticky-fingered British commando who had helped to load one of the consignments onto HMS Glasgow. (Although most were later found by the police, 296 gold coins were never recovered.) The Norwegian government resisted the best efforts of the British to persuade them to make over their gold holdings for the purchase of war materials, and transferred most of the bullion to the United States and Canada for safekeeping. As a result of this, and earnings from shipping, Norway was able to remain financially self-sufficient throughout the war, which provided a considerable advantage.4 Several other governments, including the French, Dutch and Belgian, managed to transport some of their gold abroad to safer destinations, but were not able to retain control over all of it. Most of the other exiled governments arrived in Britain without significant assets (and in some cases quite impoverished), so were obliged to go into debt and borrow from Britain in order to finance their activities.

  Another factor, which did not have the immediate impact of the merchant fleet or gold bullion, but which was of enduring significance throughout the war, was the role played by King Haakon, the Danish prince who had been chosen as monarch when Norway gained its independence from Sweden in 1905.¶ The German failure to capture or kill him during the invasion enabled him to escape to Britain where he became a focal point for the expression of resistance. His frequent broadcasts to occupied Norway were a boost to morale and his speeches were printed and widely circulated by the underground press after the German confiscation of most radios prevented many Norwegians from listening for themselves. He was also a welcome source of advice not only to his own government, but also to senior British officials and ministers.

  King Haakon kept in touch not only with Norwegians who had come to Britain to join the armed forces or to support the war effort by other means, but also, wherever possible, with members of the resistance who had returned from occupied Norway. Bjørn Rørholt describes what happened when Dagfinn Ulriksen and Atle Svardal returned to Britain after spending months manning the SIS coast-watching station Eric, north of Florø, living in a sheepfold without being able to wash or change their clothes. The King heard of their return and asked for them to come down to London exactly as they were. When he met the filthy and bedraggled pair, the King held his nose and said something in Danish which might be better imagined than translated – and then proceeded to question them keenly about their activities. Such gestures counted for a great deal among those working for the resistance.5 They were also invited to a meeting with Stewart Menzies, the head of SIS (known as CSS), a rare honour.6 When Ulriksen returned to Norway in late 1943 to man Cygnus, another SIS station in the same area, he took advantage of a supply delivery by a Shetlands-based submarine chaser to send back a Christmas tree which SIS was able to deliver to King Haakon on Christmas Eve.7 It is tempting to speculate that this symbolic gesture might have planted the seed which led to the decision in 1947 by the city of Oslo to donate a Christmas tree every year to Britain in gratitude for wartime support.

  Dagfinn Ulriksen (left) and Atle Svardal (right) after six months manning SIS hermit station Eric. They had just met King Haakon. © NHM

  Trygve Lie’s relations with Eden and the Foreign Office

  When Koht took leave in November 1940 before resigning three months later, his successor, the ebullient and more dynamic Trygve Lie, took steps to build better relations with Britain. He made clear that he wanted closer collaboration than Koht had done. He hoped that the British would take the Norwegian government more into their confidence, rather than just informing them of decisions made without prior discussion – a theme to which he would need to return quite frequently, especially in the early years. The Northern Department of the Foreign Office were supportive, pointing out how little the Norwegians were being treated as equals and Allies, citing as evidence a cut imposed by the Ministry of Information on broadcasts to Norway without any prior consultation. Eden agreed. When he first met Lie on 28 December, he suggested they should meet fortnightly in future, and that Lie might bring Prime Minister Nygaardsvold with him whenever he wished. He also proposed monthly meetings with a larger Norwegian ministerial attendance – a suggestion which caused Foreign Office anxieties that this special arrangement might create jealousy among other Allied governments who had not been so favoured.8 In the event, such regular appointments did not survive diary pressures for very long, though the meeting did lead to a Foreign Office circular to other government departments requesting they provide more ready access to Norwegian ministers in future. Lie built up a close relationship with Eden, both personally as well as officially, and played tennis with him quite frequently. The confidence they established was so great that after Lie had been confronted by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov during his visit to Moscow in November 1944, with demands for considerable concessions over Svalbard, as well as the right to establish an air base on Bjørnøya (Bear Island), he decided that on his return he wished to discuss this with Eden before he briefed his own government.9

  Lie was an effective advocate of Norwegian interests, if occasionally a little too active for the comfort of his hosts. Orme Sargent, a senior Foreign Office official, once wearily reported a visit by Lie ‘who had preached him two sermons’ about the need for a British plan to occupy northern Norway, and his concerns if this did not happen.10 King Haakon, who shared with the ambassador to the Norwegian government in exile, Sir Laurence Collier, the view that Lie was the backbone of the Norwegian government, once asked him whether the British found Lie to be pushing his case too hard. Would Collier like him to have a quiet word with Lie? Collier replied that this was not necessary.11 It was inevitable that there would be bilateral difficulties, often caused in the early part of the war by a British insistence on restrictive security which left the Norwegians ignorant of planned commando raids or other operations in Norway. Lie’s handling of many of these issues – though vigorous – produced results which generally improved cooperation thereafter. (Though not always. As Chapter 9 outlines, the decision of senior British officials not to inform Leif Tronstad – a key member of the resistance in London – of the decision to bomb the heavy water plant at Vemork in November 1943 was a significant exception, not least because Tronstad thought he had been given an assurance that this would not happen. His opposition to bombing this target was well known, and he was angry and disappointed by what he saw as bad faith.) And, while Norway may have been the junior partner in the alliance, Lie was also sometimes able to win the argument. For example, his handling of propaganda matters enabled Norway to establish primacy in making arrangements for BBC broadcasting to Norway, and to retain control of all propaganda except that directed at occupation forces. No other occupied country managed to obtain such advantageous treatment. Oscar Torp, especially as defence minister, was also an influential member of the government and an effective complement to Lie in developing pragmatic cooperation with the Br
itish – though they achieved little success in their attempts to adjust British policy towards the end of the war when it came to prioritising the liberation of Norway. It is quite possible that they would have become aware of Operation JUPITER, a plan favoured by Churchill (but not by the Chiefs of Staff) for an Allied invasion of Norway which was considered by the planning staff on several occasions between 1941 and 1944. Awareness of this would certainly have raised Norwegian expectations. But the final decision to concentrate on OVERLORD, the invasion of Normandy, was never going to be a subject for compromise.

  Close cooperation also extended beyond the two governments. It also included members of the Norwegian Labour Party (Det Norske Arbeiderpartiet, DNA). In 1941 Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, asked for some prominent DNA members to travel to Britain to help their planning, as his ministry needed more specialist information about Norway than could be provided from their existing sources. They were Konrad Nordahl, the leader of Landsorganisasjonen i Norge (LO), the Norwegian equivalent of the TUC, and Haakon Lie, later secretary of DNA from 1945 to 1969, who provided initial assistance. Both also worked closely with Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour, and established extremely close links with the British Labour Party which remained effective after the war.12

  The British perspective

  In June 1940 when the Norwegian government arrived in Britain, there was probably a rather greater awareness among their British hosts about conditions in Norway and Scandinavia generally than among the Norwegians about Britain, even though the Norwegian neutrality policy in the later 1930s meant that bilateral relations had not been close. Eden had visited Norway in 1934 when Lord Privy Seal, and in April 1940 was appointed Secretary of State for War before returning to the Foreign Office in December. R. A. Butler, a junior Foreign Office minister in 1940, had also visited Scandinavia to study the development of social democracy. Leading members of the British Labour Party (including Hugh Dalton, responsible for establishing SOE) were also interested in Scandinavia and especially Sweden: several of them had written Democratic Sweden for the Fabian Society in 1938.13 Throughout the war, nearly half the members of the War Cabinet came from the Labour Party. Halvdan Koht had been less interested in visiting London during this period. Although he initially responded positively to a proposal for a visit from the Norwegian minister in London, Erik Colban, in early 1938, he later decided that this could be misconstrued and jeopardise Norwegian neutrality, and turned it down. He rejected a further suggestion the following year, too.14

  The British agencies involved: background

  How much knowledge did the British intelligence and security services have about Norway before the German invasion? SIS (then known as MI1c) had established a station in the Norwegian capital (then known as Kristiania) as early as September 1915 to provide information on the German war effort. It produced frequent reports on this subject throughout the rest of the war.|| By early 1918, it also provided detailed reporting on the growing influence of Bolshevism in Norway, which was becoming a concern in Britain.15 The station remained in existence for some time after the war. In March 1920 the chief of SIS, Sir Mansfield Cumming, was instructed to close down eight stations, including Kristiania (renamed Oslo in 1925) as an economy measure – though the order was countermanded very shortly afterwards.16 However, for much of the interwar period, between 1924 and September 1938, there was no full-time station representative in Norway, and the station was staffed by a very competent multilingual secretary. A permanent representative, Joseph Newill, was sent there at the end of 1938. He was reinforced a year later when Frank Foley (previously head of the SIS station in Berlin) was posted to Norway to try to re-establish contact with some of his German agents and to take overall charge of Scandinavian operations.17 In this he had only limited success – for example, as Chapter 2 explains, setting up a rudimentary coast-watching system, but little else. He was also able to use SIS communications to provide secure contact with London during the evacuation from Oslo after the German invasion. Once back in London, he remained in charge of Scandinavian operations until the arrival of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, in May 1941, when his German expertise was required.

  After the First World War, the Security Service concentrated much of its effort on the threat from communist activities. Several Norwegians came to its attention.** The first was Aksel Zachariassen, who delivered £300 and messages from Béla Kun, the leader of the short-lived Soviet in Hungary, to Sylvia Pankhurst, the Bolshevik editor of the Workers’ Dreadnought in 1919. It was known that Zachariassen was coming: a testament to the effectiveness of the coverage of Bolsheviks at that time. He was arrested soon after his arrival, and deported.18 Then in 1920, another Norwegian, Anker Pettersen, was arrested in Newcastle on a charge of attempting to smuggle several thousand Bolshevik leaflets into the country,19 and sentenced to three months hard labour. Another was Leonard Aspaas, a Norwegian Comintern courier in Shanghai between 1935 and 1937. The most remarkable case, both because of his prominence and the length of time he remained a subject of investigation, involved Arne Ording, an influential academic, party activist, anglophile and post-war adviser to the Norwegian Foreign Minister Halvard Lange. The Security Service suspected that he might have had a Russian intelligence role because he and his sister had close links to two known or suspected GRU agents (from Russia’s Military Intelligence Service). The files show that he was of interest to the Security Service from 1935 (when they obtained a Home Office warrant to intercept his mail) until 1978, some ten years after his death. During the war, they were sufficiently concerned to warn the BBC against allowing Ording to broadcast on the Norwegian service of the BBC. Since they admitted that they could not at that stage justify their suspicions of him, their advice was ignored – and the files show clearly that their suspicions were never substantiated.20 This curious story shows that after September 1939, while the predominant focus of the Security Service was on the threat from German espionage, they never entirely gave up their coverage of potential communist activities – even if, as in this, case their concerns were misplaced.††

  SOE, the agency responsible for sabotage and subversion, did not exist at the beginning of the war. It was formally established in August 1940, based on a directive drafted at Churchill’s request by Neville Chamberlain in what was his last political act before his death. It was created out of three separate organisations: Section D of SIS, under Colonel Lawrence Grand, which had been in existence for two years and was responsible mainly for researching and implementing sabotage and subversion operations; Electra House, which dealt with propaganda; and MI(R) of the War Office, run by Major J. F. C. Holland, which had broadly the same responsibilities as Section D. Both Section D and MI(R) had been active in Norway before the German invasion. Section D (rather better known in Scandinavia because of its ill-fated attempt to sabotage Swedish iron ore exports, which was exposed in April 1940) had commissioned detailed surveys of the Norwegian coastline north of Trondheim in the summer of 1939 to identify suitable beaches for clandestine landings. In March 1940 it sent Gerry Holdsworth (who had previously participated in beach reconnaissances and who had also been in touch with the Swedish saboteurs) back to Norway to explore suitable methods of receiving clandestine shipments of Section D supplies. He came under threat following the German invasion and to justify his continued presence in Sweden or unoccupied Norway, established a ‘Fund for the Relief of Distress in Norway’ sponsored by reputable benefactors in Britain. It was organised under the auspices of the Lord Mayor of London and was launched on 30 April. As the SOE historian commented, ‘it continued to function blamelessly and efficiently throughout the war’.21 Holdsworth, however, had to leave Sweden shortly afterwards because of his connection with the iron ore sabotage attempt.

  MI(R) was involved in organising secret reconnaissances in northern Norway in March 1940, and in the despatch shortly afterwards of several officers loosely described as ‘assistant consuls’ to Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen and St
avanger to help with further reconnaissance to support offensive operations and the laying of a minefield in Norwegian waters. They were barely in place before the German invasion. One of them was captured, the others escaped with some difficulty and three of them (James Chaworth-Musters, Andrew Croft and Malcolm Munthe) later ended up in SOE. There were other small MI(R) deployments of limited value. It quickly became clear that the overlap between Section D and MI(R) was both inefficient and a potential source of confusion. It was decided to amalgamate them and to put the new organisation under civilian control, with Dalton in charge. Section D was transferred to him from SIS on 16 August – though by bureaucratic oversight Menzies, the chief of SIS, was not informed and only found out about the transfer of control three weeks later. Propaganda responsibilities were also transferred to this new organisation: SO2 dealt with sabotage while SO1 dealt with propaganda.‡‡