The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [179]
Although in January 1939 Bertrand organised a meeting between French, British and Polish experts, British willingness to co-operate with the Poles (and the Poles’ readiness to share their work on Enigma) did not really develop until after Neville Chamberlain’s public guarantee at the end of March to side with Poland in the event of a German attack. Late in July a second, and much more productive, Anglo-French- Polish meeting was held near Warsaw, following which the Poles supplied replica Enigma machines for both the British and the French. On 16 August Bertrand, accompanied by Dunderdale, delivered one of these to London. According to Bertrand, they were given a ‘triumphant welcome’ at Victoria Station by Stewart Menzies, dressed for dinner with the rosette of the Légion d’Honneur (which he had received for service in the First World War) in his buttonhole.12 Although Menzies clearly appreciated the significance of this occasion, and the importance of the French and, especially, the Polish contributions to GC&CS’s work on Enigma, he can scarcely have anticipated just how momentous and vital the war-time breaking of Enigma would be. This astounding breakthrough was not by itself a war-winning achievement, but F. H. Hinsley afterwards calculated that it shortened the war - and saved countless Allied lives - by perhaps three or even four years.13
Penetrating Germany
By the spring of 1938 it was no longer primarily finance which constrained SIS’s work. In April 1938 Sinclair told the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff that it was not ‘a question of money, as we have now ample funds with which to take advantage of an opportunity which offers, or any circumstances that may arise, in which money might help’. ‘No one’, he said, was ‘more fully alive to the importance of obtaining information as to German Air Rearmament than the S.I.S., but the fact of the matter is that during the last twelve months or so, things have become very difficult indeed in Germany.’ Ever since the Nazi assumption of power in March 1933 Sinclair had been worried about Germany. In October that year he told Ernest Dalton, head of station at The Hague, that ‘unless a miracle intervened’ there would be war between France and Germany in a very few years. With Sinclair evidently assuming that (as in 1914-18) the Netherlands would remain neutral, Dalton was instructed to ensure that ‘(i), our communications and (ii), information about the German Armed Forces shall be maintained in the event of war’. In the early 1930s SIS had few sources within Germany itself. The most important was a Balt, Baron William de Ropp, born in Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire) in the 1880s. He was naturalised British, having served with the British forces in the First World War. After the war he had offered his services to British intelligence, and was first seen by Menzies on 30 April 1919, after which he was taken on as an agent. He worked as a journalist in Germany and the Baltic states, and during the 1920s, coded ‘821’, he reported regularly on German political matters. Although there were concerns in Head Office about just how valuable he was (especially as he was being paid £1,000 a year), the pressing need for intelligence following Hitler’s rise to power gave him a rarity value. ‘He is putting out some good stuff at the moment,’ wrote Rex Howard in February 1934, ‘and is our almost only [sic] resource in Germany.’
One of de Ropp’s high-level Berlin contacts arranged for the head of SIS’s Air Section, Frederick Winterbotham (posing as a ‘member of the Air Staff’), to visit Germany in March 1934, during which he had an interview with Hitler, made his number with several senior Nazis, met young Luftwaffe pilots and successfully established himself with them as a friendly face. On his return Winterbotham