This page has extracts from Guy Liddell’s diary that Bob King has commented on.

4 November 1940

In connection with Tate’s transmitter.  He reported that earlier, before he had been provided with the present one, he was given a transmitter that was a much larger instrument, which he said was used by parachutists in Holland and Belgium. They told him that he would be given a special combination in order to open the back of the transmitter to put it into operation, and that if this combination was not used (that is to say, if it was opened by someone unaware of the combination), the instrument would be blown up by a small bomb which was to be placed inside.

[Presumably the booby trap type was considered too heavy for parachute work but what secrets were likely to be inside the transmitter?  Perhaps it was just a way of getting at the enemy]

8 December  1940

Dick White has just produced another magnum opus based on the intercepted Group messages and what we have learned from the captured agents. We are now beginning to get quite a good picture of the German espionage organisation.

[This was evident at Arkley where we had identified 14 groups by the time I got there at the beginning of 1942.  Each group had an officer in charge with a staff depending upon the size of the group.  Group 2 centred on Berlin was the largest and we had, I would guess, about 10 staff working on this group in addition to those like me who fed information from the operators to the groups as we identified them.  Sometimes the group rejected them, in which case we had to look for another home.]

10 December 1940  [This is Guy Liddell writing]

I met two Americans at Waterloo station today.  They are Hugh Clegg and Clarence Hince, previously reported as Florence Hince. We had all expected to see a glamour platinum blonde and were much disappointed. We told him so and he seemed to think it was a good joke.

Clegg and Hince had been sent to London by the FBI Director, Edgar Hoover, to study British intelligence organisations and procedures.

[This is not RSS material but shows that there was a degree of cooperation between our intelligence services and the FBI.  Sometimes there was suspicion on both sides that each was holding something back (which we did) and there was some agro. Later in the war cooperation became closer]

5 October 1940

Another parachutist has arrived. His name is Karl Grosse, and he has a British pass- port in the name of Alfred Phillips which it is suspected he obtained in Luxembourg. He is a German who returned to Germany from America via Japan after the outbreak of war. He has a one-way set and maps of the Liverpool area. His instructions were to hike about and report on morale (or as he put it morals), road- blocks, weather conditions, etc. We had already heard about him from TATE. He is going to work his set and we propose to run it as a very obvious double-cross in order to enhance the value of SUMMER and company. Grosse is a poor fish who never wanted to be a spy He joined his regiment and when a sergeant asked who spoke English he rather foolishly put up his hand. Before he knew where he was he was an indifferent spy dropped down from the air into Northampton. SUMMER was a well-established Swedish double agent, Goesta Caroli, who had parachuted into England in September 1940. Karl Grosse, a soldier in the elite Brandenburg Lehr Regiment was enrolled as GOOSH.

I appear to have solved the mystery about agent Goose as written above.
On looking through my list of agents arriving here I noticed that Gander fitted the date and Hinsley and Simkins in Vol 4 of Brit. Int.WW2 give an account on page 325 which fits very nicely.

Next to arrive was another German, christened Gander by MI5, who landed by parachute on 4 October, and was found by a farmer sheltering in a barn. He had a wireless transmitter but no receiver, £140, a forged identity card which did not, and a ration book which did, correspond with particulars obtained through Snow and Biscuit. He was wearing civilian clothes, but was carrying German Air Force uniform and an Army paybook, and proved to be a member of the Lehr Regiment Brandenburg zbV 800, a special unit closely associated with the Abwehr.   His instructions were to cover the Midlands from Bedford to Liverpool, including Birmingham and Coventry, and to rejoin the invading forces which he could expect in about a fortnight. He was to transmit daily weather information and report on morale. He agreed to act as a double-cross agent, but having only a transmitter could be used by MI 5 only for a few weeks until his mission was exhausted. Nevertheless his willingness to co-operate, together with the fact that he had never been a member of the Nazi Party, saved him from prosecution and he was detained for the duration.

Whether the name was reported incorrectly to Guy Liddell or whether he confused it we will not know.

It is interesting that the German High Command expected  that  England would be largely occupied within a two weeks of Gander arriving on the 4th October 1940.   My wife sailed for New Zealand on the Rangitane 4 weeks later as an evacuee, only to be returned after a few days sailing because the City of Benares, also carrying children, had been sunk by U-boat.

I put this information in for those who are trying to understand the feelings and attitude during this terrible time when we saw little hope on the horizon.  This went for Churchill too, in private.  When it is remembered that towns like Plymouth and Merseyside were practically obliterated by relentless air attacks, with 70,000 homeless in one town alone it is hardly surprising that when the tide of war changed there was no more sympathy here for what Germany was suffering than they had had for us earlier.

This atmosphere undoubtedly contributed to the secrecy that members of the Security Services maintained for these many years where even their closest relations and friends did not know what our work was.

Further notes regarding Abwehr agents arriving in Britain 1940.

It is often supposed that these agents (spies) were of the James Bond type, highly trained and skilled (and attractive to women?)

Far from it, they were sometimes of the criminal class and poorly prepared for the task assigned.  Some were in it for the money or perhaps excitement and in 1940 probably did not expect to be operational for long, as the Germans would shortly be taking over control of Britain.  An instance is Gander who was landed without a receiver, as he was only to operate for about two weeks before the Germans would over-run the Midlands or beyond.  Snow, the first agent and already in this country pre-war, was another doubtful character and it was never clear for which side he was acting and apparently he was prepared to take money from both sides.

We now move on to 1941 in the Liddell diaries and to Summer again, the Swede who made a brutal attempt to escape, as you will see in this attachment.  He had been promised his life in return for cooperating with us and this brings to our notice the conflict between Lord Swinton and both MI5 with SIS.  Churchill had demanded that all spies should be shot, as he failed to understand the use MI5 could make of them if circumstances were favourable.  This conflict of opinion persisted throughout the war although MI5 did succeed in most cases.  However once a promise had been made to an agent it was kept and Summer was not therefore executed.  There was a risk that if spies were brought to trial it might reveal the existence of the double cross system.  In total 16 spies were executed but not all these used radio, in which case they do not appear in these notes.

Earlier, when in contact with the Abwehr under our supervision, he reported to them that he was based near Cambridge.  Just where I have not found out, if indeed it was true.  It would be unwise to give a location far removed from the true one as no doubt the Germans, with their excellent direction finding ability would be suspicious.  It is further revealed that Tate operated from near Barnet and Zigzag was set up in a house in a northwest London suburb.  Later Mutt and Jeff were located there.   I would like to know the precise location as I suspect I cycled past many times during my years at Arkley.

In September Jeff had been interned on the Isle of Man in Camp WX close to Camp L, the latter being used for Nazi prisoners.  Illicit communications developed between the two camps until Camp WX was move to Dartmoor.  In November 1943 it was reported that the WX detainees had heard that a Nazi from Camp L had been repatriated and were confident that he would have told the Germans that Mutt, Jeff, Tate and Summer had worked for British Intelligence.  This is unlikely as we had clear evidence that these agents were trusted by the enemy and Tate in particular, otherwise he would hardly have been awarded the Iron Cross.

13 January 1941

An unpleasant incident occurred this afternoon. SUMMER, one of the parachutists, knocked down his keeper, then tried to throttle him, and finally tied him up. He got hold of a motorcycle and canoe from a neighbouring barn and set forth in the direction of Newmarket. Here he fell off his bicycle, and handed himself over to the police.

Clearly SUMMER can never be allowed to use his wireless transmitter again and he will have to remain under lock and key.

16 January 1941

We had a long discussion this morning about SUMMER and that of the other people with whom he has been associated. We have all come to the conclusion that somehow or other SUMMER must be eliminated. This is not, however, an easy matter.  In the eyes of the Germans he is known to BISCUIT and he has also been in touch with TATE. Through BISCUIT he is known to SNOW. If therefore we report that he has been captured the Germans may think that the whole organisation has been compromised. Various ingenious suggestions have been made. The best I think is that BISCUIT should report that SUMMER is on the run, that he has put his wireless into the cloakroom at Cambridge station, and sent the key to BISCUIT. Later we could say that he has been picked up by the police for failing to register and later still SNOW can put forward another candidate who will use his set.

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