Secret Alliances Page 6

  Rear-Admiral Godfrey, director of naval intelligence (DNI), had set out his operational requirements to SIS in November 1939. He specified the interest of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) in the activities of the more important German naval units and their movements and those of merchantmen carrying iron ore along the Norwegian coast, as well as the building programmes for the Bismarck and other major warships.26 Both NID and SIS had some small successes even before the German invasion. By February 1940, the Admiralty were aware of the movements of a German trawler operating off the Norwegian coast, and GC&CS were soon able to decypher a few of its transmissions, the first of what became a very significant stream of intercepted messages, as outlined in Chapter 4. SIS had also set up a rudimentary system of coast-watchers, using mainly lighthouse keepers, who were under the impression that their reports went only to Norwegian authorities. They were not always very reliable, and their reports were hard to confirm. Godfrey noted that ‘they gave us a bad scare one night by reporting the fishing fleet as a fleet of battleships, cruisers and destroyers steaming northward at 20 knots’. NID were also in discussion with SIS about other ways of enhancing their reporting. They believed that they would require a sea-going watching service to become really efficient. SIS investigated the purchase of a Norwegian company owning six whalers, which could be used for their normal business of whale-catching outside territorial waters, but routed when necessary through territorial waters. They would have been particularly useful for the area north of Tromsø, because the Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) at that time was generally satisfied with reporting of the coastal regions south of that point. The scheme was not finalised before the invasion and, afterwards, it fell apart.27 Moreover, as has been shown, the first few attempts to establish reporting stations had not been very successful either. Nonetheless, Godfrey was initially inclined to be generous about SIS performance. He acknowledged in July 1940 that it took time to train agents and case officers and ‘the SIS organisation in Norway, though still in its infancy (since it had to be established de novo after the invasion) is already covering large stretches of coast’.28 However, a comment on SIS achievements up to the end of 1940 observed that there had been an almost complete lack of useful information from CX – or intelligence – reporting. This was disheartening after eight months of war.

  Section D and SOE

  There was similarly little consultation with the Norwegians by Section D of SIS, and later SOE, in the early stages. The genesis of their first operation was actually a plan put forward by MI(R) in late April, with the idea of landing small forces or organising small detachments at about fifty points to harry the enemy if the German advance enabled them to limit regular operations to a relatively restricted area. In early May Section D developed the idea further, with the specific objective of attacking communications installations in the Voss area behind Bergen. They selected a rather motley group of twelve largely untrained men, led by Simon Fjeld, but his instability meant that the effective leader was a Swede, Karl Kronberg. The party included both Rubin Langmo and Karsten Wang, who had earlier enjoyed a career for four years as a bootlegger, running illegal supplies of alcohol between Bermuda and the Florida coast. They sailed on 25 May. Some of the crew soon became very nervous, and wished to return to Britain, which they did, leaving Kronberg and Langmo to carry out the mission. They were moderately successful, destroying the water supply for a power station at Bjølvefossen, which put a ferrosilicon works out of action for some weeks, as well as some telephone and electricity pylons.29 They returned to Shetland in mid-June having completed the first Allied raid in occupied Europe.‡‡‡

  It was planned that Langmo and Fjeld would return to Norway on another mission two weeks later. They would be accompanied on a separate operation by Olav Wallin and Otto Aksdal. However, on the night before their departure, after spending the evening in the bar and becoming much the worse for wear, Fjeld attempted to shoot Langmo. Fortunately the gun jammed and he failed. He had a breakdown and was sent abroad, but died when his ship was torpedoed. Langmo continued alone. Although their transport carried plenty of sabotage equipment, the mission of Wallin and Aksdal was mainly to gather intelligence on German activities, particularly troop and naval movements in the area around Bergen, but they did also help to organise some small groups. They had barely a week’s training before they left, a further reflection of the improvisation which was so much a feature of that period. It was also unusual that they were tasked with intelligence gathering rather than sabotage, which may partly have reflected their lack of training, but also the demands made on Section D by SIS at that time. Unfortunately their radio failed, but they were able to obtain a spare condenser from Bergen. (This was a recurring problem for both SOE and SIS: at least four radios failed to function during this period.30) Becoming concerned about their security, they returned to Britain two months later.31 They agreed to attend the first SOE training course for Norwegians held at Station 17 at Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire, which specialised in demolitions, but fell out over what SOE considered to be an excessive demand for a bonus. They were taken off the course and interned in Brixton prison for several months. An SOE record noted:

  We should not be blackmailed into paying them exorbitant wages or bonuses. These two men were sent to the training centre, and made such exorbitant demands for money that we had to remove them, and in order to preserve security, the higher authorities decided to have them both interned for the duration of the war.§§§ 32

  In fact, they were released after several months following the intervention of Martin Linge and Chaworth-Musters, and Wallin joined the Norwegian Navy. The SOE section history mistakenly noted that at the end of the war he was still rendering good service there,33 although he had actually rejoined SOE in April 1945, serving in Force 136 which supported operations in Malaya.34

  The Shetland base

  The first few trips across the North Sea to Norway were organised on a fairly rudimentary basis. Things started to become more organised when a base was established near Lerwick on 11 November 1940 by Leslie Mitchell of SIS, who had served briefly in Oslo before the German invasion. He was sent to Lerwick jointly by SIS and SOE to examine refugee Norwegian fishing boats which had begun to arrive in increasing numbers. Most made for the Shetlands as it was a favourite peacetime fishing ground. Both services agreed that it would be valuable to have an officer present who could obtain intelligence and recruit suitable ships and crews to take agents back to Norway. Mitchell recommended a suitable anchorage at Catfirth, twelve miles north of Lerwick. At this early stage, German defences were limited and fishing boats could mingle freely with coastal traffic. British defences and screening processes were not well organised either, as Chapter 5 illustrates.

  The camouflage of the boats was perfect as they returned to Norway in the state in which they had left – it was only later that they began to be both armed and armoured. The short summer nights meant that the operational season for the Shetland was limited to the period between September and April, when the greatest threat to the crews and their passengers was not always the Germans, but violent and occasionally deadly winter storms. SOE’s records for the initial 1940–1941 season are incomplete, but estimated that about twelve operational missions were sailed, taking fifteen agents over to Norway. Both SIS and SOE agents were carried, and they were sometimes transported on the same vessel on their different missions. The number of operational trips increased quite significantly as the war progressed – in the 1941–42 season there were forty-one, which landed forty-seven agents (seven for SIS) and 130 tons of stores.

  The tenuous lifeline across the North Sea. Heland waiting to transport an SOE agent back to Shetland after a reconnaissance mission in the Lofoten Islands. © Scalloway Museum

  The development of an SOE policy towards Norwegian operations

  During the autumn, SOE started to work out a coherent policy for Norway. Early attempts were directed rather more towards fostering a rebellion
, but these were abandoned once a proper overall directive had been worked out by SOE, the Chiefs of Staff and the planning staff. It emphasised the need for sabotage and subversion to undermine German strength, and for organisations to be built up in occupied countries such as Norway to support British-led invasions when the time came. While this appraisal was taking place Charles Hambro, a British banker, was appointed to take over as head of an expanded Scandinavian section, and began the recruitment of Norwegians.¶¶¶ Chaworth-Musters had obtained agreement from Koht and Ljungberg to the appointment as liaison officer of Martin Linge, who had served in a similar position with British forces during the early part of the Norwegian campaign but was injured and brought to Britain in late April. They also obtained consent from General Fleischer, the Norwegian commander in chief, for Linge to recruit suitable candidates from Norwegian refugees who had arrived in Britain and for them to be released from the Norwegian armed forces. It was not easy to find sufficient people with the qualifications required, and their numbers were often fewer than SOE wanted. Fleischer later agreed that SOE could recruit an intake of twenty-five men a month until they had reached a total of 250 (excluding the crews in the Shetlands providing transport to Norway), though there were occasionally periods when they were prevented from doing so.

  The early deliberations before Linge’s appointment showed that while SOE wished to have a licence to make use of Norwegian personnel for their operations, they also wished to restrict as far as possible the extent to which the Norwegian government was made aware of, and still less involved in, their activities. They were concerned about the risks of insecurity. SOE accepted that ‘we might get into very troubled water if we attempted this without telling the Norwegians. The Norwegians as a people are notoriously ill-disciplined and are great talkers.’ There was a reluctance to agree to any closer cooperation with the Norwegians or to any further disclosure of SOE’s plans than might be necessary to secure goodwill.

  Since some measure of liaison seems inevitable, I propose to take steps to see that the channel of communication with the Norwegian authorities is the same as in the case of SIS, and to ensure that the channel is as narrow a one as possible – preferably one man appointed by the Norwegian government expressly for the purpose.35

  From SOE’s point of view Linge filled that role admirably.

  SOE produced its first paper on Norwegian policy in December 1940. It stated that in the long term, it would aim to train and equip local resistance groups, preparing them to support an Allied landing in Norway when the time came. In the shorter term, it would aim to sustain Norwegian morale by a mixture of sabotage operations mounted from Britain by SOE teams against special targets, and support for the Directorate of Combined Operations (DCO) in their mounting of ‘tip and run’ operations. A further development of this paper in April 1941 spoke of organising as many tip and run operations against important objectives on the Lofoten model (i.e. coastal raids) as might be practicable. It assessed that because of its long coastline which assisted communications with Britain, as well as the high morale of its population, Norway could become the best field for subversive warfare. The paper concluded: ‘it is assumed that the locking up of a number of German divisions in Norway, which will be the result of this short term policy, will be desirable from the strategic point of view’. There is no evidence that either the planning staff or the Norwegians were involved in the preparation of this paper, though in many respects the concentration of German forces in Norway by this means would be a very desirable outcome.36

  SOE in Stockholm: an uncertain start

  It took time to organise a transport system across the North Sea. The first planned operation, involving Odd Starheim (known as Cheese) did not start until January 1941. It was much easier to obtain access to Norway through the land border from Sweden. Malcolm Munthe (one of the MI(R) officers who was sent on a reconnaissance mission to Norway in March 1940) arrived in Stockholm in July 1940 after an arduous two-month journey on foot from Stavanger. He was appointed assistant military attaché and given responsibility for re-establishing an organisation in Sweden, after the Section D disaster in April 1940 when one of its agents was imprisoned.|||||| He was tasked with setting up communications with Norway, and starting resistance activities. At that time, morale in the Norwegian legation was low, and it appeared to the British that few of the staff there had much interest in working against the Germans. Norwegian refugees arriving in Sweden found a more enthusiastic reception in the British legation, and Munthe was quickly able to recruit some willing helpers. For example by mid-October, among other courier activities, Johnny Pevik (later to be involved in SOE activities with Lark and Wagtail) had already made two trips to Trondheim, and established contact with Leif Tronstad.37

  Later in October, Hambro visited Stockholm to oversee the further development of a section of SOE based in the legation, which would cover Scandinavia. He made Peter Tennant responsible for Sweden and Germany and Ronald Turnbull responsible for Denmark, and instructed that Munthe’s work dealing with Norway should also be expanded. Hambro wanted sabotage in Norway to be initiated from Sweden as well as from London, but only on London’s approval. The system of communications between Munthe and Hambro at this early stage was quite elementary. It was based on a book code using the works of John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic, known only to the two of them. The first results of Munthe’s work were quite encouraging. The Bergen-Oslo railway was sabotaged in November, which put it out of action for a short period, and the following month it was attacked again by the RAF. Their pilots were guided by flares provided by SOE agents. Morton, the Prime Minister’s personal assistant and intelligence adviser, informed Churchill of the SOE contribution to this attack. Churchill replied, ‘Until I got your memo I had not realised that your people played so prominent a role in the recent successful air operation against the Bergen-Oslo railway. This is very satisfactory.’38 However, two of Munthe’s Norwegian agents were arrested by the Swedes and, following a Swedish protest, the British minister Victor Mallet tried unsuccessfully to have him recalled. This led Munthe to devise an elaborate cover for his work. He set up a non-existent organisation called ‘Red Horse’, which consisted solely of a mythical wealthy Norwegian refugee who travelled frequently and secretly between Norway, Sweden and Britain carrying orders from King Haakon and Allied war departments. Munthe claimed that Red Horse occasionally used an intermediary to pass messages to him, and that he would then pass them on, typed on special paper, and stamped with a red horse, to various Norwegian addressees. This subterfuge enabled Munthe to present himself simply as a passive recipient of information. We do not know how effective this cover was, but it certainly added to his workload.

  Munthe was apparently also involved in organising an attempt to assassinate Himmler when he visited Oslo in January 1941, though the archival evidence consists only of a brief reference in the SOE Norwegian section history. It recorded that the attempt failed because Himmler did not arrive at Oslo East station at the expected platform, the train having taken a different route. Two Norwegians, Tom Wettlesen and Christian Aubert, were arrested carrying weapons provided from Stockholm, but one escaped, and the other was released. Munthe’s autobiography gives a slightly different version and states that he consulted Mallet. Given Mallet’s views about the work of SOE in Sweden at this time, it would be surprising if he concurred in this plan without first consulting the Foreign Office, and no record has been found which shows that he did so.

  Meanwhile, Munthe continued to run into trouble. In January 1941 the Swedes showed Mallet some detailed evidence from the trial of several Norwegians and Swedes who had been jailed for carrying messages from Sweden into Norway to help to foment trouble against Germans there. The material implicated Munthe and the Swedes once again sought his withdrawal. This was avoided, but it led Mallet to review the standing of SOE and the value of its work. In a letter to the Foreign Office, he stated that he believed that the legation was strongly suspect
. He anticipated that if there were many more cases of staff being compromised, then he might himself become persona non grata. Mallet noted too that the military attaché, Sutton-Pratt, had recently been asked by MI9**** to explore the possibility of arranging an escape of prisoners from Germany. Mallet considered this to be a futile venture.

  Here again it will be a case of using neutral Swedish territory for an operation against what Sweden still has to regard as a friendly power. It will be almost impossible to get any Swedish merchant captain to take part in such a venture, which would quite likely land him in jug.

  He added that he did not think that the game was worth the candle and suggested that SOE should be closed down in Sweden and its work transferred to SIS:

  In fact, it is a pretty black outlook for SOE if it tries to operate from within Legation or Consulates… If there is no other way of getting SOE messages to Norway except through this legation or one of its branches, I think it should be seriously considered whether it would not be wiser to do the whole job through the PCO.†††† I know he would hate it and think it too risky for his other work. The point is however that someone has to take the risk and it is less serious from the point of view of our relations with the Swedish government if Martin‡‡‡‡ is caught out than if I or my immediate subordinates in the Legation are. The PCO is looked upon by the Swedish authorities as a suspect character, but since the unlucky Rickman affair I believe they have convinced themselves that he is not working against Sweden and are therefore not worrying about him. Although he holds diplomatic rank, I do not think that the Swedish Foreign Ministry really look on him as having much to do with me, and if he burns his fingers they will hardly consider me or other members of my staff to be au courant with his activities or seriously compromised thereby. I have not mentioned this to him, as I know he would violently oppose it, but I think you ought seriously to consider it. It is, after all, a less serious matter if a PCO gets blown than if a Legation does – at least that is my perhaps prejudiced view as I happen to think that the information coming from the Legation is more reliable and important than that which reaches you from other sources… If the game really is worth the candle, then of course I shall just have to be sacrificed, but I feel that our other activities … are really of greater value at the present time.39