Secret Alliances Page 7

  He received an emollient but firm reply from the Foreign Office stating that they judged the game was worth the candle: ‘It is our considered opinion that SOE must operate from Swedish territory and that the Scandinavian activities of SOE are more important than any other advantages we can obtain from Sweden’.40

  However, further SOE operations went wrong. The final straw was when a bomb which had been planted on a train carrying materials to the Germans in Trondheim exploded prematurely on Swedish territory at Krylbo. Munthe was withdrawn in June, and went to work in SOE headquarters. His successor, Hugh Marks, did not last long either. He undertook some ill-judged activities which aroused the displeasure of both the Swedes and Mallet, and he returned to Britain in October. Mallet continued to find fault with SOE activities, complaining that a visit by a prominent trade union adviser John Price had been organised by SOE and not by the legation. This led the Foreign Office to wonder whether SOE work in Sweden should be carried on with Mallet’s consent or without. ‘There might be something to be said for the latter’.41 In the end, it did not come to that. Matters were smoothed over eventually, helped by the fact that thereafter SOE in Stockholm were not so directly involved in the organisation of sabotage activities in Norway. Nonetheless, Stockholm became a very important centre for both British and Norwegians for the development of resistance work.

  Notes

  1 John Kiszely, Anatomy of a Campaign: The British fiasco in Norway, 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 110.

  2 Ibid., pp. 83–85 and pp. 110–112.

  3 See, for example, the examination by Major General Francis Davidson, director of military intelligence from 1940 to 1944, of Norway as a case study of intelligence failure to heed the lessons for future intelligence work. Liddell Hart Military Archive, Davidson 4/3.

  4 Basil Collier, Hidden Weapons: Allied Secret or Undercover Services in World War II (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 1982), pp. 65–70.

  5 TNA, HW 12/251, report No. 79679 of 4 April 1940.

  6 TNA, letter from Menzies to Hankey, 14 April 1940, PREM 1/435.

  7 TNA, report No. 80 of 11 April, 1940. Halifax described this as ‘a very valuable report’. FO 1093/206.

  8 TNA, letter from Hankey to Wilson, 29 April 1940, PREM 1/435.

  9 TNA, Menzies letter to Jebb, 31 March 1940, FO 1093/206.

  10 Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 1, p. 115, quoting T. K. Derry, The Campaign in Norway (London: HMSO, 1953), pp. 16–18.

  11 TNA, CX 0114 of 25 January 1940, FO 1093/206.

  12 TNA, FO 1093/206.

  13 Hinsley, pp. 108–109.

  14 Hinsley, p. 119, also quoted by Kiszely, p. 103.

  15 TNA, PREM 1/435. See also Michael Goodman, The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 69–75.

  16 TNA, report 78644, HW 12/249.

  17 Olav Riste, ‘Intelligence and the “Mindset”: The German invasion of Norway in 1940’, Intelligence and National Security (2007), Vol. 22, No. 4, p. 527.

  18 TNA, despatch by Halifax, 12 June 1940, FO 371/24833.

  19 TNA, minute by Collier, 14 June, FO 371/24833.

  20 TNA, despatch by Eden, 28 December 1940, FO 371/24828.

  21 TNA, letter from N. F. Hall, MEW, to Admiral Taylor, Admiralty, enquiring about possible naval action to deal with these minerals, 3 May 1940, HS 2/239.

  22 Rørholt, Usynlige soldater, pp. 29–30; Ragnar Ulstein, Etterretningstjenesten i Norge: Amatørenes tid, Vol. 1 (Oslo: Orion, 2008), pp. 23–25 and 28–35.

  23 Rørholt, pp. 142–143; Jeffery, MI6, p. 376.

  24 RA, letter from Welsh, 16 December 1941, Nagell box 3.

  25 Sverre Midtskau, London svarer ikke (Oslo: Ernst G. Mortensen, 1968), pp. 60–69.

  26 TNA, letter from Godfrey, 18 November 1939, ADM 223/851.

  27 TNA, post-war summary, written by Godfrey in November 1947, ADM 223/475.

  28 TNA, letter to the Vice Chief of Naval Staff, 28 July 1940, ADM 223/851.

  29 TNA, HS 2/241–242.

  30 TNA, Cheese, HS 2/150.

  31 Interview with Carl Wallin, family records.

  32 TNA, minute by Chaworth-Musters, 3 November 1940, HS 2/128.

  33 TNA, evaluation of SOE activities in Norway, HS 7/178

  34 TNA, HS 9/1553/6.

  35 TNA, minute of 5 August 1940, HS 2/240.

  36 TNA, HS 8/321.

  37 TNA, HS 7/174.

  38 TNA, minute from Churchill to Morton, 20 January 1941, PREM 3/409/7.

  39 TNA, Mallet letter to Hopkinson, Private Secretary to Cadogan, 5 February 1941, FO 371/29408.

  40 TNA, Hopkinson to Mallet, 21 March 1941, FO 371/29408.

  41 TNA, Warner minute, FO 371/29408.

  * The extent to which GC&CS was reading Norwegian diplomatic cyphers during this period will be examined in more detail in Chapter 4.

  † In fact, Sir Robert Vansittart, the former Permanent Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office, had already drawn the Admiralty’s attention to this book in April 1939. The Norwegian naval authorities had been aware of it since at least 1936.

  ‡ Secret Service, i.e. SIS.

  § During the occupation, the term ‘jøssing’ (from Jøssingfjord) came to be used as a complimentary term for a patriotic Norwegian, the opposite of a ‘quisling’.

  ¶ The executive office of the director for naval intelligence.

  || It is not easy to identify other positive outcomes, though once the war was over and politicians reverted to their more familiar tactics of cut and thrust, the somewhat unpredictable and outspoken Harold Laski tried to find one. When the British Labour party was invited to DNA’s national conference for the first time in September 1945 Laski, the chairman of the party’s national executive, gave a speech in which he thanked the Norwegians for Narvik, ‘because it enabled us to get rid of the Chamberlain government, which is the worst that Britain has had’. (Arbeiderbevegelsens bibliotek, DNA Landsmøteprotokoll 1945.) There is no record of how Laski’s Norwegian hosts responded to this questionable compliment.

  ** And the Soviet Union. A message intercepted by GC&CS records the rejection by the Russian Foreign Ministry of a Norwegian protest concerning two overflights of the Norwegian border by Soviet aircraft on 18 and 31 January 1940.

  †† SIS informed the Foreign Office in early 1943 that a Dutch military attaché who had been in Berlin in April 1940 had later told them that he had informed both the Norwegian and Danish legations of German intentions to invade both countries on the night of 8/9 April, and that he had passed on this information five days beforehand, i.e. on 4 April. (TNA, FO 371/36876.)

  ‡‡ The lack of confidence extended to London and diplomatic exchanges too. Cadogan recorded in his diary an ‘extremely embarrassing meeting’ with the Norwegian minister Erik Colban, who had asked about rumours that the British were abandoning their attempt to recapture Trondheim. Cadogan noted that ‘he could only evade the question by saying that “we would do our damnedest”’. (David Dilks (ed.) The Diaries of Alexander Cadogan OM 1938–1945 (London: Cassell, 1971), p. 274.)

  §§ Colin Gubbins, who spent most of the war in SOE and ran it from September 1943, commanded a force of five independent companies, known as Scissorsforce, in Norway during this brief campaign. They played an unorthodox role and did so effectively. Gubbins was one of the few officers acknowledged to have come well out of the Norwegian campaign and his experience of working with such unconventional forces stood him in good stead when he took over SOE.

  ¶¶ Ljungberg and Lie were careful also to say that Hambro was energetic and meant well, but the British did not consider him to be well-disposed or pro-British. Indeed in 1943 Eden told a meeting of the War Cabinet that ‘if any of them should meet Mr Carl Hambro, the President of the Norwegian Parliament, he thought they ought to be aware that certain of his recent activities had shown him to be not very well disposed towards this country’. (TNA, WM (43) War Cabinet 127 (43) meeting 13 Septe
mber 1943, CAB 63/35.)

  |||| Koht subsequently submitted his resignation on 27 January 1941, and Lie’s appointment was formally announced in February.

  *** Direction finding was often known as ‘D/Fing’.

  ††† Utenriksdepartementet Etterretningskontor, or Foreign Ministry Intelligence Office.

  ‡‡‡ Some of the other participants on this operation had mixed fortunes. Kronberg, the Swede, committed suicide because of personal problems while Olav Leirvåg, the pilot, became the chief chaplain to the Norwegian forces.

  §§§ It is not clear whether there was any particular consideration which prompted their request. By this time, Norwegian seamen had also raised concerns about low rates of pay, as well as the lack of defensive equipment on their ships. And so, later, did the Shetland crews who as civilians provided transport for both SIS and SOE across the North Sea – and were enlisted into the Norwegian Navy as a result.

  ¶¶¶ Hambro was a merchant banker who was distantly related to C. J. Hambro, the Storting President. He became CD, or executive director of SOE, for a year in May 1942.

  |||||| This was an attempt to sabotage some of the port equipment at Oxelösund, which was used for unloading iron ore shipped from Norway. It had been approved by Chamberlain and Halifax, but was disrupted by the Swedes before any action could be taken and a British agent A. F. Rickman was among those who were imprisoned.

  **** MI9 was a directorate of Military Intelligence formed in December 1939 to facilitate the escape of British forces from prisoner of war camps, and to develop techniques to assist servicemen to evade capture if stranded behind enemy lines. The SOE historian M. R. D. Foot estimated that MI9 and its American sister organisation, MIS-X, helped, between them, over 30,000 prisoners of war to escape back to active duty.

  †††† The PCO, or Passport Control Officer, was often the cover position occupied by members of SIS.

  ‡‡‡‡ John Martin had been the head of the SIS station in Stockholm since October 1937.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘DANGEROUS RIVALS’

  SIS AND SOE: DID THEIR DIFFERENCES DAMAGE OPERATIONS IN NORWAY?

  No matter how hard the Norwegian section tried, and it tried ‘somethinged’ hard, it could never get to grips with and work in accord with its opposite section in SIS. It was a case of personalities. With other sections of SIS, notably Section V, and with the officer in charge of the corresponding region it was all right, and co-operation proceeded on an equable basis. There was frequent intercommunication between the two sections, weekly meetings were tried, but were a total failure.

  SOE NORWEGIAN SECTION HISTORY, DESCRIBING RELATIONS WITH SIS.1

  It is scarcely surprising that relations between SIS and SOE were destined to be fraught. As Menzies told the Secret Service Committee in March 1941, the practice of SO (Special Operations) was frequently inimical to that of SI (Secret Intelligence). Any significant act of sabotage was likely to provoke an intense security response which in turn could jeopardise the less dramatic and more sustained activities necessary to obtain secret intelligence. Moreover, SIS may well have continued to feel some resentment at the way in which SOE had been hived off and formed following the dissolution of Section D, a part of its own organisation – particularly since Menzies was not informed until three weeks afterwards. In this respect, SIS itself may have been partly to blame, because of the poor quality of Section D’s leadership and because some of its operations, such as the attempt by Rickman to blow up the iron ore loading cranes at Oxelösund, went badly wrong. The diplomatic problems which this created for Britain in Sweden lasted for some time, and the consequences for Section D were equally unwelcome. By their nature, SIS intelligence gathering operations if they went wrong were unlikely to have such damaging and visible consequences, except perhaps for the agent involved: the Venlo incident was a rare exception.*

  So what were the causes of these inter-service differences and, in particular, how great were the problems which they caused in Norway?

  After a fairly Byzantine process, Hugh Dalton was made Minister of Economic Warfare with responsibility for SOE. In August 1940 he appointed Sir Frank Nelson, an ex-businessman, former Conservative MP and latterly an SIS officer who had worked in Switzerland from September 1939 to July 1940, as his first director. Gladwyn Jebb, private secretary to Cadogan, was appointed Chief Executive Officer.2 He drafted a document, signed by both Menzies and Nelson, which defined the nature of the relationship between the two agencies. It stated that D (as the head of SOE was sometimes known) ‘is intimately associated with C [i.e. the chief of SIS] both on historical and practical grounds, and if he is to function efficiently, it must be with the friendly cooperation of C’.3 But the rules to which both sides consented were more advantageous to SIS than they were to SOE, and sowed the seeds of future disputes. The agreement covered projects, transport, communications, spheres of interest and recruitment of agents. The first two subjects were relatively simple, allowing for reference to a higher authority, which would have been the Chiefs of Staff, in the event of a disagreement. But the next three were much less straightforward for SOE. It was agreed that all wireless traffic would be handled by SIS, which would be free to reject it; any intelligence collected by SOE was to be passed to SIS before circulation even within SOE, and while SOE might take the initiative in recruiting agents, it was not to proceed further without the consent of SIS. As their historian pointed out:

  These limitations were very reasonable from the point of view of C, as the advocate of a single centralised Secret Service, in the interests of good administration, good security, and good intelligence; but experience very soon showed that they were incompatible with the licence to grow which had already been given to SOE by the War Cabinet.4

  As SOE began to recruit and train staff, and to work out how it could effectively play the role which was expected of it, processes which necessarily took time, SIS did not always cooperate and make life easy. The first few months though went reasonably well, because Menzies’ liaison officer Colonel Calthrop worked closely with Nelson and regular weekly meetings were arranged between Jebb, Nelson and Menzies. There were a few niggles, such as an SIS complaint about insecure behaviour by an SOE officer in Stockholm, but nothing serious. However, at the end of April 1941, Rear-Admiral Godfrey, the DNI, complained that SIS operations to provide intelligence for the Admiralty were being jeopardised by SOE. Of operations in Norway, he wrote: ‘the opportunities for sabotage have led SOE to initiate projects there on a scale which cannot but endanger the permanent intelligence centres which have been established and which are planned for the future’.5 He sought a directive from the Chiefs of Staff confirming that operations to obtain such intelligence should have priority over other subversive activities. Menzies preferred to avoid the involvement of an outside authority, and it was agreed that his deputy Claude Dansey should act as an arbitrator between the two services. This arrangement worked well for a few months. Soon, though, as SOE planned to expand its operations further, frictions grew and became less easy to resolve. Joseph Newill, then running the Norway section of SIS, commented on the consequence of this increase in the despatch of agents that there were ‘many examples of line crossing, which increases the hazard to our agents to such an extent as to make their work almost impossible’.6 There were quite frequent squabbles over communications as SOE sought to obtain more independence, provoking some testy outbursts from the head of the SIS communications section Gambier-Parry, who wanted to maintain control over all aspects of SOE communications. He belittled SOE’s plans to work independently, describing them as ‘extravagant, insecure, fatuous and very dangerous’. Menzies supported him, writing to Nelson in February 1942 that he ‘viewed with dismay a document on communications plans, DY/TC/187, issued on 22 January 1942, to your Country Sections’.7 However, SOE maintained their demands and in March 1942 Menzies eventually agreed that they should have autonomy over most of their own communications. Sometimes the inter-service
squabbles had to do with primacy – SIS reacted badly to an SOE proposal that the two services be jointly represented in West Africa under an SOE nominee. This disagreement was a primary cause of Dansey’s decision to withdraw as the inter-service arbitrator in December 1941.8

  SOE complains to Eden about SIS behaviour