The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [193]
During 1937 Sinclair, ‘convinced of the inevitability of war’, also initiated expansion plans for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). He instructed the School’s operational head, Commander Alastair Denniston, to identify ‘the right type of recruit’ to reinforce GC&CS ‘immediately on the outbreak of war’. Having secured Treasury sanction for ‘56 seniors, men or women’ and ‘30 girls’ with graduate-level knowledge of at least two relevant languages, Denniston discreetly combed British universities and mobilised his network of contacts for potential recruits. A series of courses were arranged for candidates to give them ‘even a dim idea of what would be required of them’. As a result, GC&CS was crucially able to expand rapidly in the summer of 1939 to meet wartime signals intelligence demands. Though focusing more on universities, GC&CS’s recruitment process was as informal and personalised as that for SIS as a whole. Frank Adcock, Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, who had worked in the Admiralty’s Room 40 during the First World War, was particularly assiduous on Denniston’s behalf. One Cambridge colleague, an Italian specialist, recalled being invited to dinner by Adcock and under conditions of great secrecy being offered ‘a post in an organisation working under the Foreign Office, but which was so secret that he couldn’t tell me anything about it’.34
In April 1938 Sinclair recruited a former soldier, Captain Richard Gambier-Parry, from the telecommunications firm Philco Limited, to create SIS’s Communication Section VIII. Gambier-Parry claimed that he was given the following oral instructions by Sinclair: ‘I get a great deal of valuable information. They drive it round Europe in a “Carrozza” [a coach or carriage] before it reaches me. Your business here will be to do something about it - Good morning.’ Section VIII’s most difficult task was the provision of wireless sets for agents. Nothing suitable was available commercially, so Gambier-Parry established a small workshop and laboratory at Barnes in west London to research and develop secure portable sets. In October 1938 Head Office recognised that providing agents with wireless sets raised difficult issues about the trustworthiness of the individual, whether he was sufficiently ‘intelligent’ and ‘could be taught Morse [code]’, and how the sets would be concealed. The representative in Athens reflected the cautious line taken by several stations. For an agent to be caught with a wireless set, ‘and the better the disguise, the more compromising’, would be ‘equivalent to a death warrant’. Apart from those rare individuals ‘actuated by idealistic motives’, he could not see ‘many candidates coming forward’. After Gambier-Parry had sent a prototype set to Stevens at The Hague in March 1939, Head Office decided that risks now had to be taken with providing sets for agents operating in German ports, especially ones capable of reporting the departure of commerce raiders, since the ‘early interception of these vessels will depend on timely warning of their departure’. Commander Russell of the Naval Section dismissed the argument that being caught with a wireless set meant an automatic death penalty as ‘they already face the death penalty and I fail to see any reason why the information they obtain should deteriorate in war’. Since the Service failed to recruit any successful agents to report from German ports, however, this debate remained purely theoretical.
Wireless equipment for SIS stations abroad was technically less problematic but normally needed the permission of the local British minister, which was not always forthcoming. Nevertheless, good progress was made by September