The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [169]
As in the Low Countries, during the 1930s SIS’s operations in Scandinavia gradually moved away from the Soviet target to focus on Germany. Here, too, local sensitivities about their neutral status, and well-founded fears of antagonising the Germans, influenced the extent of cooperation with local security and intelligence authorities. In Stockholm, sources in Swedish Military Intelligence were prepared to share information about suspected Communist activities in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but were markedly less forthcoming about Germany. Lieutenant-Commander John Martin, who became head of station in October 1937, made sustained efforts to recruit locally based Britons and Swedes whose business connections with Germany offered the possibility of intelligence which might survive the outbreak of war. A Norwegian clerk in a shipping company in Oslo, for example, was taken on in 1939 to report on arms shipments. He in turn recruited a sub-source to visit German ports, but no evidence survives that they produced intelligence of any great value.
The situation in Denmark was rather similar. In January 1927 London had given the longstanding head of station in Copenhagen (in post since 1920) four main objectives in order of priority: Germany, Russia, ‘Norwegian & Swedish air’ and ‘Arms Traffic’. He reported considerable endeavours, but not much substantive progress in any of these areas. He was followed by a retired RAF officer, appointed to Copenhagen in August 1928 after less than a year in the Service, including three months as a learner on the Athens station. His departure from the Service in mid-1936 reflects the continuing hand-to-mouth financial basis on which the interwar organisation was run, depending to a great extent on representatives having a private income to supplement the hairshirt salaries SIS for the most part offered. He resigned after the brusque rejection of a plaintive appeal to the Chief that, after twenty-two years in government service and at the age of forty-six with growing family responsibilities, he might be given established status, perhaps in the RAF, with some pension entitlement.
Both the Copenhagen head of station from 1936 until early 1940 and his predecessor put a good deal of effort into acquiring assets in Schleswig-Holstein, where they hoped ethnic Danes resident on the German side of the frontier could be recruited as agents. In January 1938 Sinclair observed that ‘by its geographical position’ Copenhagen was ‘very favourably situated’ for obtaining information on Germany. The head of station was, therefore, to concentrate almost exclusively on that target, to ‘make every endeavour’ to acquire information on the German armed forces, and especially to try to recruit a naval officer. But Copenhagen was a one-man station, and, with no operational assistants (though he did have two secretaries), this was much easier instructed than implemented. Although there were Danes in Germany who could cross the frontier and report low-level eyewitness information on the German forces in the area, contact with them was necessarily cautious; the Germans were alert, their counter-espionage measures active, and they could easily close the border, as they did at the time of the Munich crisis. No wireless sets were yet available to overcome such a simple but effective break in contact. None of the station’s resident agents