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By Root 2694 0

Berlin, Captain Gerard Muirhead-Gould, while confirming German ambitions to have a submarine arm, erroneously assured London that construction had not yet commenced. Although the Admiralty, it appears, initially placed more weight on Muirhead-Gould’s assessment than on SIS’s report, the latter was confirmed by a public statement from Berlin the following month. In July 1936, again apparently based on SIS information from Krüger, a detailed paper on German naval construction, jointly prepared by the Naval Intelligence Directorate and the Industrial Intelligence Centre (which had been established by Desmond Morton in 1931), reported German plans for the mass production of submarines.15 The Admiralty, however, remained unconvinced, though afterwards it turned out to be quite true. In November 1939 the SIS Naval Section grumbled with some justification that they had warned about German submarine construction and had ‘continued this warning notwithstanding the incredulity of the Admiralty when the German[s] informed them officially that it was not taking place’.

At the beginning of 1938 Winterbotham affirmed that German air information was ‘one of the most vital to the country and no opportunity should be lost to hammer into the heads of the representatives concerned the necessity to obtain some agents of high standing in place of a whole bunch of organisations’. Frank Foley, for example, should be instructed to ‘cling on to “Jones” at all costs’. In April 1937 a person signing himself ‘B. Jones’ had handed a letter into the British consul in Zurich for onward despatch to the ‘Officer Commanding the Military Section of the Intelligence Service’. The letter expressed pro-British sentiments and explained that a Luftwaffe officer friend of the writer was willing to supply documents at £100 a time. Copies of five recent German Air Ministry orders were enclosed, which, when the material was forwarded to London, were found to be of the highest importance. The case was controlled by Head Office with Foley in a supporting role, but was extremely difficult to run, mainly because of the problems posed by communicating in a police state with a pseudonymous document-producing agent who refused personal contact. Communication was through poste-restante addresses in Germany and ‘Jones’ deposited several packets of documents with British consuls in Germany and Switzerland. The agent abruptly ceased activity in February 1938, less than a year after he had made the first contact, when he felt himself coming under suspicion. It was a frustratingly brief run of success, as Winterbotham had estimated the material supplied to be ‘worth all the rest of the money spent on German air information put together’.

Four months later Winterbotham sent an RAF officer, ‘479’, on a motoring tour of Germany to obtain eyewitness reports of German airfields. Bringing with him ‘a suitable [female] secretary’, 479 paused in the Netherlands where he spent two days ‘coaching’ his companion. For three weeks they toured Germany, but found the going quite hard. As a general rule the Germans, it seemed, did not bring the edges of their airfields right up to the road. In the worst cases there was a belt of cultivation one or two hundred yards deep between the road and the aerodrome, evidently intended to keep interested observers at a distance and ‘quite unlike anything in this country’. In too many instances 479 could see only the tails of aircraft and ‘seldom got close enough to get numbers’. He was also driving a distinctive vehicle, and ‘every time we stopped we were surrounded by small boys all anxious to know the power, speed, make and price of our Wolseley. There can be few small boys in N. W. Germany’, he reported, ‘who do not remember the strange English couple and their car.’ More dangerously, they attracted the attention of Nazi Brown Shirts, who ‘turned the car inside out’ and followed the couple for several days. The two ‘decided to confuse the issue so made wild dashes all over the country’ which ‘either shook them off or they lost interest’. After covering