RSS/SCU Newsletter no.21 JAN 2005
Welcome to the Radio Security Service and all SCUs Newsletter.
The date for the 2005 reunion at Bletchley Park is arranged for the 1st May at 1100. Entrance is possible by 1030 and is usually charged at £8 for those without Freedom of the Park.
All ex-members, relatives and friends are welcome.
I am unable to say in which room we will meet but I can say with certainty that it will not be the usual one. In the absence of further information, enquire at the Mansion where directions will be available. Although this is a Bank Holiday weekend it is the most suitable Sunday for the Trust and I hope it will not present travelling difficulties. Our programme will include a talk by Pat Hawker on the origins of the RSS and an up-dated report on Bletchley Park by Geoffrey Pidgeon.
Extreme accuracy
Sometimes 'What did you do during the war, Daddy?' is followed by a possibly even more interesting 'What did you do after the war, Daddy?' John Foster explains.
Please let me have any other contributions, either for Newsletters or talks.
Did you have an unusual or interesting post-war career?
We shall of course have the usual general opportunity to recount experiences and refresh memories.
Several events took place during 2004 such as the survey of the Park by English Heritage which makes extremely interesting reading. Geoffrey's publication, the first and only full description of the SCU organizations in WW2 by those who took part, continues to be widely popular here and abroad. Keith Taylor appeared on television as part of the commemoration of the D-Day landings describing the part played by SCUs in this action. At the evening lecture I gave at Bletchley Park in October I was able to explain the place of the work there within the general set-up of Signals Intelligence and the part played by the RSS, radio amateurs, in obtaining a detailed understanding of the German intelligence service. Also emphasised was the point that without the Y service and RSS input and the painstaking work at Whaddon and Gambier Parry's organization the 'decodes' would have been useless.
Some authors have belatedly learnt about the Abwehr enigma intercepts and discovered that Oliver Strachey was working on them at the Park; they therefore assumed that it was only the 'Y' service which intercepted messages. The material to be deciphered appeared by some unspecified means, neglecting to recognize the immense strain imposed upon the skilled intercept Morse code operators. It is a pity that the 'Secret Wireless War' is not read by authors writing about signals intelligence. I have incidentally asked Brian Oakley if he can produce the '60 years ago' papers in a book form, when they are complete, as they make fascinating reading, not only about BP successes and failures but they also give a first class potted history of the war's progress at home and abroad.
Some intensive research has been taking place near the Belfast site of Gilnahirk by some Irish enthusiasts. I have received aerial photographs and some 200 photos of the interior of the huge building which GCHQ (known locally as CSOS) built over the site where the SCU hut stood. This is about to be demolished to make way for 'development'; perhaps housing. The only visible relic of wartime activity is the concrete dome which stood over the buried tank, which was part of the direction-finding (D/F) system. It seems to be certain that the RSS employed the usual wooden hut and set up 12 banks for the operators. This structure was demolished post-war and the present brick building erected on the same site to fulfil the needs of GCHQ. An advanced form of HF direction-finding then replaced the RSS Adcock system and MW D/F aerials were added. It would be interesting to discover why this site was chosen for the RSS or the GPO station that preceded it. Reports indicate that the wartime staff was billeted out in the surrounding villages.
What is also exciting is the increasingly common release of information from the National Archives at Kew (formerly the Public Record Office). Mike Coleman (G1YVR), with a friend, obtained permits to photograph documents and load them into a laptop computer so that between the two of them they copied several hundred documents in one day. Now of course comes the task of checking through them and collating the information. Well done, Mike: we hope that some secrets of the RSS will be revealed. Heads of Departments and Commanders were required to make detailed reports on their wartime work and I know that Col. Morton Evans did so. He did not know what became of it but one can assume that it is hidden away in the National Archives. Release of some documents is delayed because offence may be given to relatives still alive or actions revealed that today are unacceptable and this may account for the scarcity of reports about the SCUs.
A windfall document from the Archives was obtained, by more conventional means, by John Gallehawk and passed to David White who has kindly typed it out and e-mailed it to me. This paper, in the form of a memo dated 1942, describes how the confusion over the deciphering of RSS intercepts by Messrs Gill and Trevor-Roper came about and why Bletchley Park initially rejected the material. How valuable this information would have been if it had been available to me when I was in contact with Lord Dacre (HTR) who died last year. His paper 'Sideways into SIS' appears to be incomplete and slightly in error, as it was written some time after the event. Had I been able to discuss with Lord Dacre this recent discovery it may have jogged his memory and no doubt added more to the history of that time. The paper 'Sideways into SIS' is one of my library papers and is available on request to g3ase@onetel.com.
I will not say more about the 1942 memo at this time because Pat intends to give us a talk in May about the origins of the Service and I can include a synopsis of his talk in the follow-up Newsletter.
In my lectures regarding Signals Intelligence during WW2 I emphasize the place of Bletchley Park in the scheme of things. Alone BP would have been pointless and in fact could not have existed. It relied upon a large number of other organizations, principally those feeding-in encrypted information and those distributing in a secure manner the resultant intelligence. The public has been well informed about the success, and failures, of intelligence gained about the enemies' military forces but scarcely anything of the almost complete penetration of the opposing secret intelligence services, that was an important supplement to military operations. In some cases this knowledge stood alone as a significant aid in our prosecution of the war. The D-day deceptions alone were supplemented by, chief among others, the Garbo double agent and this was kept from the public for some time after the release of the Enigma success and even now is seldom referred to in historical accounts. Garbo was the most amazing agent of all time but with the end of the war he failed to find a niche and as his work that was kept secret for so long he faded into obscurity.
Garbo, a disaffected Spaniard, was located in Lisbon and communicated with the Abwehr by a fictitious courier who supposedly received written reports from Garbo in Britain. Garbo had never been to this country and had only old maps and reference books on which to base his knowledge. With the skilfull use of press reports and other readily available information he convinced the Germans that he was a valuable agent. RSS intercepts revealed that the Abwehr were receiving information of superb inaccuracy and eventually after the usual struggle between MI5 and SIS Garbo was brought to Britain, where he proved to be the double agent of all time. During the D-Day planning period he built up a network of about 20 non-existent sub-agents and played a big part in the success of operation Fortitude. This was the existence of the phantom 'FUSAG' (First U.S. Army Group) army poised to invade Europe via the Pas de Calais. He richly deserved the Iron Cross bestowed on him by the grateful Germans.
This is only a taste of the work of this incredible deceiver, who could not even read the Morse code. Other agents were also involved in this particular deception and between them, they passed some 500 messages to the Abwehr in Madrid. The RSS provided the evidence, revealed by ISOS (Intelligence Service Oliver Strachey), that the Abwehr had passed these on to Berlin.
There must surely be more history crammed into the 1940s than in any other similar period.
Bob King 01480 463129 (g3ase@onetel.com) January 2005