The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [180]
De Ropp was mainly briefed and debriefed by Woollcombe during visits to London, but he also reported discreetly in Berlin, met by Foley or a colleague from the Berlin station. This, though, became increasingly hazardous. There exists on file a copy of some extremely detailed security instructions laid down by Sinclair personally to Foley in October 1933 for meeting de Ropp and handling his reports so as to avoid the slightest risk of compromise. No papers relating to the agent were to be kept in Foley’s office or typed there; no meetings held in apartments or in the PCO’s office; de Ropp’s reports were to be written on the day fixed for a meeting and at the last minute before the meeting, ‘so that he walks straight out to the meeting with them, and they are in his possession, or in his flat, for as short a time as possible’; meetings to take place on the last day before bag day (when the diplomatic bag was sent to London) ‘according to a pre-arranged roster of varying rendezvous. This in order to avoid telephone messages about meetings.’ These instructions are a clear indication of the importance attached to the case, and of Sinclair’s own close attention to detail. In August 1938, following the Anschluss and increased Gestapo surveillance of foreigners, de Ropp began to get edgy and asked to be moved away from Germany, but Sinclair did not approve. ‘If de Ropp is to be of any use,’ he wrote, ‘he must work between here and Germany.’ The agent, however, relocated to Switzerland that August and, although he continued to report for the next seven years, his work was increasingly discounted at Head Office. By July 1944 Claude Dansey, then Vice Chief of the Service, decided that all de Ropp represented now was ‘a vehicle for Nazi propaganda’.
The question remains open as to which side got the greater benefit from the de Ropp case. The Germans evidently thought that they got the British contacts they wanted, although it did them little good in the end. Through Winterbotham, who seems to have played his part well, the British got timely intelligence about the development of the Luftwaffe which they probably would not otherwise have been able to acquire, as well as uniquely close-up observations on the characters and ideas of the Nazi leadership. In June 1938 Woollcombe estimated that ‘at least 70%’ of SIS’s German political intelligence came from one very good source, de Ropp. ‘If for any reason we lose him,’ he wrote, ‘it is obvious that our supply of “XP” [political information] will . . . be very seriously affected.’ Whether or not this intelligence was put to good use by its recipients is a different matter.
SIS’s best source for German naval matters was the veteran agent Dr Karl Krüger (TR/16) whose continued access to German shipyards informed reports especially about submarines, the construction of which had been prohibited under the Treaty of Versailles. This was of special interest to the Admiralty as the U-boat was (in Wesley Wark’s words) ‘pre-eminently an anti-British weapon’. In the spring of 1935 SIS reported that the Germans had begun discreet preparations to rebuild their U-boat force and there were ‘strong indications’ they were ‘already constructing several submarines’. Demonstrating the confused state of contemporary intelligence on this subject, the naval attaché in