The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [192]
Claude Dansey, head of station in Rome
(1931-6), who later led the ‘Z Organisation’
and was Assistant Chief of SIS during the
Second World War.
Cohen recalled that not much was produced. ‘We beavered away with various characters - mostly disreputable or impecunious - who had (or professed to have) some pretext for visiting Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. They brought back little more than low level identifications of troops and planes.’ One ‘agent’, who never left England, managed to send back coded postcards through an associate in Germany, before being unmasked by Dansey. Cohen himself met a couple of higher-level agents, one with contacts to Dr Schacht, ‘Germany’s “financial wizard”’, and another German navy anti-Nazi whom Cohen had to contact in Switzerland.32 Z Organisation also developed a naval reporting system, using British merchant navy captains on ships sailing to German and Italian ports. Briefed on specific requirements, they were provided with cameras and debriefed by a Z Organisation representative.
The 22000 Organisation was similar to Z Organisation but operated within the main SIS establishment. It started in early 1938 with two officers, the senior being Dick Ellis, and, as with Z, its primary tasks were the penetration of Germany and Italy. Agents were recruited mostly from the business, journalistic and academic world. Over the short period before the war broke out, it does not seem to have made a very great intelligence contribution. One postwar review claimed that ‘22000 agents produced economic intelligence on the Rhineland and Ruhr, and a certain amount of information on German Order of Battle.’ A relative of the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, was considered by the Foreign Office to be ‘a valuable political source’. Sinclair sent Ellis and others abroad on particular missions, including one SIS officer as a tourist to Taranto to report on the harbour’s defences. One of Ellis’s contacts (with whom Desmond Morton also had dealings) was a wealthy Canadian businessman in his forties, William Stephenson, who had a distinguished First World War record as a fighter pilot. In the mid-1930s, Stephenson, who later played a very significant role in SIS as head of the British Security Co-ordination in New York during the Second World War, had created his own private clandestine industrial intelligence organisation, the services of which he offered to the British government. Put into contact with SIS (which was initially not very enthusiastic), Stephenson meanwhile set up in Stockholm the International Mining Trust (IMT), ‘under cover of which he aimed to develop contacts into Germany and elsewhere to provide industrial and other intelligence’. Closer links were established after Ellis began developing the 22000 network, and up to the outbreak of the war the IMT proved quite useful in providing information on German armament potential. Ellis afterwards served for a time as Stephenson’s SIS deputy in New York.33
In the mid-1930s a branch (Section X) was set up to tap telephone lines of embassies in London. Much of this was done in close co-operation with MI5. By 1938 the work had expanded so much that a P (or Press) Section was established to distribute the product. Sinclair and Vansittart at the Foreign Office worried about telephone security at British missions abroad and the Service was given responsibility for checking this. But with only one General Post Office telephone specialist available ‘and with the general apathy and ignorance that appears to have prevailed abroad, nothing much was achieved’. Section X, nevertheless, successfully listened in to conversations to and from, and within, a large number of foreign embassies. These are variously said to have included, prior to the outbreak of war, those of Germany, Spain,