The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [190]
Like so many others, Broadway was dumbfounded by the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939. In fact, an SIS agent, code-named the ‘Baron’, with good contacts among the Junkers of East Prussia and run by Harry Carr from Helsinki, had first reported secret German- Soviet negotiations in the spring of 1939. A further report in June that the talks were making good progress was greeted with incredulity in London, where the desk officer concerned refused even to circulate it to the Foreign Office as he could not understand how the Baron could have had access to such extremely secret matters without high-level contacts in the German Foreign Office. Carr discovered afterwards (and too late) that his agent had got the information from close friends in East Prussia who themselves had been visited by officials involved in the negotiations and had talked freely among such trusted company. The June report arrived just as Sir William Strang of the Foreign Office was visiting Moscow in a last-ditch effort to secure an Anglo-Soviet agreement. Head Office naively commented to Carr that it could not be correct for Molotov (the Soviet Foreign Minister) to have said to Strang the day before ‘the exact opposite of statements in the report from your source’. But such was the case, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact paved the way for both Germany and the Soviet Union to invade, and occupy, Poland. The Pact was announced on 22 August. That evening John Darwin of Section VIII wrote in his diary: ‘Russo-German pact! Everything very alarming . . . C.S.S. on warpath in view of possibility that we have been accused of letting F.O. down. The usual chase after a scapegoat that can’t defend itself. I think this one can.’ The implications were obvious and the following day Darwin sent his wife Sibyl a postcard from the Travellers Club in London. ‘I don’t want to seem alarmist,’ he wrote, ‘but I really think that the Germans will invade Poland this weekend or early next week,’ a prediction that was out by only a day or two. 27
Creative improvisation
The 1930s saw a considerable expansion in SIS activities, especially as the international situation worsened during the second half of the decade. One important development in 1931 was the creation of an Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC), headed by Major Desmond Morton and drawing on the expertise he had developed in SIS’s Economic Section VI, which had itself been created some time in 1926-7.28 The Centre began as a ‘secret nucleus’, and stayed embedded within the Service until 1934. It had a wide sphere of interest, though the principal focus was on industrial capacity for war. One definition of industrial intelligence was ‘any information regarding the industrial development of a country which may throw light upon the extent of its potential armed forces effort or plans’.29 Morton made quite a success of it, but its expanding activities began to eat into SIS’s own scarce resources. In May 1932 Sinclair complained to Sir Edward Crowe at the Department of Overseas Trade that the centre had cost almost £3,000 over the last year, at a time when SIS funds were ‘already strained to breaking point’ owing to the fall in the international value of sterling. Hankey was not very sympathetic to Sinclair, and evidently valued the work of Morton’s new outfit. He thought SIS ‘ought to fit it in somehow, if necessary by letting something else go’.30
Morton’s development of industrial intelligence inevitably brought him into contact