How did I come to be in the British Secret Service-alias MI6, alias S.I.S. during the war? How does anyone come to be in any Secret Service? Such a service cannot recruit by open means. Patronage and accident are the only ways in. I had no patron there. I did not belong either to London club land or to the Indian police, its two chief recruiting grounds. So I came in by accident and sideways; not personally, but as part of a package. The episode itself has some significance; it forms a small chapter, or at least a footnote, in the history of S.I.S.
Certainly I never envisaged myself in that mysterious organisation. Such training as I had to be an officer was as a horsed cavalry man. Just before the outbreak of war I had served an attachment to the still unmechanised Life Guards, pounding on a steaming black charger up and down sandy knolls in Surrey. When war was declared I was in Oxford, awaiting orders. Then the Bursar of Merton College, of which I was a Junior Research Fellow, told me that he needed a junior officer and bade me follow him. He had served in the first World War, in the Royal Engineers (Wireless Intelligence) in Egypt and Salonika and was determined not to be left out of the second. His name was E.W.B. Gill, a genial philistine with very little respect for red tape, hierarchy, convention or tradition. In Egypt he had used the Great Pyramid as a mast for wireless interception, and in Oxford he had jolted his college into modernity by introducing electric lighting into its quadrangles. He had written a book about his experiences in the previous war, entitled War, Wireless and Wangles. Now that war had come again, he was returning to wireless and wangles. I was tired of waiting and I followed him.
He had found himself a niche in a very small unit called Radio Security Service (R.S.S.), or more formally, M.1.8(c), a section of M.1.8, the newly formed communications department of the War Office. The declared purpose of R.S.S. was to seek out unidentified radio signals which might emanate from German spies planted in our midst, to act as 'beacons,' directing enemy bombers to targets in Britain. If such were found, our next duty would be to locate the secret radio transmitters. This was to be done with the help of the Post Office, which had a fleet of direction-finding vans, normally used to hunt down unlicensed operators. The spies thus found would then be dealt with by the internal security service, M.I.5, which at that time was housed in Wormwood Scrubs Prison. Gill and I thus began our work in a very old-fashioned and insalubrious prison-cell.
M.1.5 itself was also rather old-fashioned at that time. Its Director-General was Sir Vernon Kell, who had been its first head during the Boer War. and had ruled it ever since. I found the officers of M.1.5 very agreeable: conversation with them was much easier than with my two or three colleagues in the R.S.S., whose technical jargon 1 did not understand. At one time another intelligence officer was needed, and I suggested an Oxford friend, Harry Fisher. He was turned down because he could not define a heterodyne. Nor indeed could I; but I was already in.
As it turned out, the entire original purpose of R.S.S. was misconceived. We were hunting a quarry that did not exist. There was in fact only one German spy active in Britain when the war broke out, and he was controlled by M.1.5; and the German bombers were not led forward to their targets by head-beacons in England but directed from behind by tail-beacons in Germany. However, this was not known at the time, and so we dutifully combed the evidence for suspicious signals. This evidence came to us from three main sources. First, we had under our direct control three small intercepting stations at the three corners of the kingdom at Land's End, John O'Groats, and on the cliffs of Dover: the widest base we could get in our narrow island. Secondly, we had the unidentified material rejected by the monitoring services of the Armed Forces, the B.B.C., and cable companies. Finally, we had a network of "voluntary interceptors"-enthusiastic amateurs throughout the country, mobilised for the purpose by one of our original officers, Lord Sandhurst, in peacetime a wine-merchant. However, in this indiscriminate flood of material we did ultimately. discover some mysterious signals which, from the accompanying operators' chat, we knew to be German, and this we dutifully, sent to the cryptographers of the Government Code & Cypher School recently installed at Bletchley Park.
Bletchley, which would afterwards become so famous, was not then fully organised, and our liaison with it was not yet regular. What exactly happened at this point I am still unsure. At the time we were given to understand that our stuff was not wanted: it had been identified as harmless. and could be ignored. In retrospect I think that this may have been a misunderstanding, or an evasion. But the message delivered to us was unambiguous. We understood that we had been rebuffed and that no more of the material was to be sent.
Gill was not satisfied with this rebuff, and so we decided to prove our point by working on the material ourselves. He had some experience in cryptography and I knew German. So in those blacked out evenings, in the flat which we shared in Ealing, we worked on it and, in the end, succeeded in breaking the cypher: which I hasten to add, was not of the highest class. When we read the messages, we found that we had stumbled on a great treasure, the radio transmissions of the German Secret Service, or Abwehr in particular, its stations in Madrid and Hamburg, the former conversing with its substations in Spain and Spanish Morocco, the latter with its agents on the Baltic and North Sea coasts, some of whom were preparing to land, by boat or parachute, in Britain. There was also a station at Wiesbaden, which seemed to concentrate on training spies for such adventures, and whose laborious initiation of its pupils gave us some valuable hints. We were naturally excited by this coup, and so, when we reported it to him, was our Commanding Officer, Colonel Worlledge an old-fashioned, honourable but perhaps not brilliant regular signals officer from the first World War. He ordered me to write a document about it, which I gladly did, and which he then- rather naively; I fear-circulated to his normal customers with a covering note stating that this document, by Lieutenant Trevor-Roper, seemed to deserve distribution. No doubt he expected to hear a general purr of approbation. R.S.S. might not have discovered any radio spies in England, but clearly it was earning its keep.
He was quickly undeceived. When the document reached M.I.6, there was an explosion. The chief of its counter-espionage section, Major Cowgill, newly arrived from the Indian Police in Calcutta, declared roundly, and apparently more than once, that 'Lieutenant Trevor-Roper ought to be court-martialled." At the same time, Colonel Worlledge received a rocket from his superiors in M.I.8, to whom presumably, M.I.6 had complained. We were gravely reprimanded for having deciphered the documents and formally forbidden to do so again, "since that was the province of G.C. & C.S." We did not take any of this very seriously. After all, as we understood, G.C. & C.S. had refused to handle the stuff, and I was merely obeying the orders of my commanding officer. Relations with G.C. & G.S., at our level, were soon mended and the position regularised. The raw material was now sent regularly to them, and the deciphered texts were distributed to a much more limited list of recipients, under the acronym ISOS, i.e., "Intelligence Service, Oliver Strachey," Strachey, the elder brother of Lutton Strachey, being, from now on, our regular contact at Bletchley. He was a long-serving epicurean professional cryptographer, not easily ruffled by such passing inconveniences as the outbreak of war. Later he was succeeded by my former classical tutor at Oxford, Denys Page, which made things easier still.
R.S.S. had opened a window into the very council chamber of the enemy secret service. This discovery was potentially of great importance: so important that it must be kept a closely guarded secret. M.1.6, at that time, was desperately in need of some success. At the beginning of the war, it had suffered a humiliating reverse. Its two chief officers in the Hague, Major Stevens and Captain Best, who controlled the relics of its already damaged organization in Western Europe, had been lured to Venlo, on the German border, for a pretended meeting with important German dissidents, and had there been kidnapped by the Gestapo. In prison in Berlin, they had revealed all and M.1.6 knew it, for their revelations had been published in the German press. Thus the whole organisation of M.1.6 in Western Europe, already half-rotten, had collapsed. In these circumstances the penetration of the secrets of the Abwehr offered a double benefit: immediately, compensation for a dreadful failure, and, ultimately a far more trustworthy source of information about German espionage.
However, if they were to appropriate and exploit these benefits, the rulers of M.1.6 saw that they must secure control of R.S.S. itself. This it must be admitted, in view of the changed role of R.S.S., was logical. It would also enable M.1.6 to impose its own rules of security and thus prevent further leaks to its closest rival, which it regarded with almost equal suspicion, M.1.5. Which is what now happened. Naturally I was not privy to the discussion, which must have taken place at a high level, far above my head. But the result soon showed itself. In May 1941, R.S.S. was detached altogether from the War Office and M.I.8, removed physically from the embrace of M.1.5, and transferred to M.I.6. While it kept its old name, its original function dwindled into a sideshow, and its accidental discoveries became its main purpose. Liberally financed, and equipped with a completely new and central radio receiving station at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, it became the whole-time intercepting station of M.1.6, which hitherto had had no such thing. The Abwehr, all its schedules known, was now monitored round the clock and the volume and regularity of the material thus obtained enabled G.C. & C.S. to achieve one of its great triumphs. In December 1941, the Enigma cypher of the Abwehr was broken and the window through which we had peeped was thrown wide open, giving a continuous view of events within. This was a great help to our operations: in particular, the success of our double-cross system would have been impossible without it. So the disaster at Venlo was more than compensated. Indeed, in retrospect, I regard that disaster as a blessing in disguise. It swept away a rotten system of venal spies which, had it been maintained, would have been controlled by the Germans just as their spies were controlled by us-though less effectively since they, had not an open window like ours.
So ended that brief chapter in the history of British Intelligence. The Grandees of M.I.6, in annexing R.S.S, had no intention of encumbering themselves with the directors of the old firm. So Colonel Worlledge, having vainly resisted the change, was quietly dropped and retired to his castle in Ireland. The real genius of the affair, Major Gill was also deliberately overlooked. Left to find other employment. He became a radar officer and an expert on captured German equipment. Under the new regime, his name was never mentioned. Although I do not think that he would have found himself at ease among the self-important mandarins of S.I.S., the manner of his extrusion seemed to me rather shabby. After all, he had thrown them a lifebelt which, after they, had run their own ship aground, had enabled them to be winched to safety. And afterwards, on dry land, to congratulate themselves on what they should claim as their achievement.
Endnote
1. It is often said that R.S.S. was part of M.1.5, or subject to it; M.I.5's intercept station,' etc. E.g., F.H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World Vol. 1 (London: HMSO 1979), pp. 12On. 131, 272. 277. This is incorrect. R.S.S. was never controlled by. M.1.5. The position was correctly stated in M.E. Howard's vol. 5 in the same series (1990) where he correctly places R.S.S. under M.I.8.