The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [194]
Early in 1939 a main SIS communications facility, with a full twenty-four-hour service, some four transmitters and six receiving positions, was set up at the Service’s new ‘war station’, Bletchley Park, a small country house and estate in Buckinghamshire some fifty miles north-west of London. Based on the widely held fears that any war would begin with massive enemy air attacks, contingency plans were made throughout government to relocate office functions in an emergency out of the centre of London. Sinclair bought the property on 9 June 1938 for £6,000 (£275,000 in modern values). This was clearly done on his own initiative, and there is a Service tradition that he paid for it out of his own pocket. Whether this is true is less certain. The relevant property transaction documents show him personally as the sole owner, and after he died in November 1939, apart from legacies of £3,500 to each of his two sons, his sister Evelyn inherited the remainder of his property, with a total value of £21,391. In April 1940 Evelyn (as personal representative of ‘Sir Hugh Sinclair deceased’) transferred Bletchley Park to William Ridley and Percy Stanley Sykes (the Service’s Finance Officer) for ten shillings (fifty pence). In their turn, on 3 March 1947, Ridley and Sykes transferred the property to the Ministry of Works, again for ten shillings, all of which strongly suggests that the original purchase money had come from public, if not also SIS, funds.35 The initial purchase price was in any case only the start. In November 1938 Sinclair noted that the cost of installing telephone and teleprinter lines to Bletchley Park was likely to cost ‘several thousand Pounds’. During the Munich Crisis, partly as a precautionary measure and partly as a mobilisation exercise, Sinclair sent the Government Code and Cypher School and Head Office staff to Bletchley. He claimed afterwards to Sir Warren Fisher that it was ‘the only War Station that functioned correctly during the crisis’. After the crisis most of the staff returned to London, but in August 1939 the code-breakers returned. Bletchley Park became their headquarters and the site of their great wartime triumphs.36
Also in the first half of 1938 Sinclair decided to set up an organisation ‘to plan, prepare and, when necessary, carry out sabotage and other clandestine operations, as opposed to the gathering of intelligence’.37 This was Section IX or D (allegedly for ‘Destruction’) Section. A Royal Engineer, Major Laurence Grand, was seconded to be its head. While he had no experience of intelligence work, he was described as ‘a man of energy and ideas, to whose personal force tribute is paid by all who worked with him’. Grand wrote his own, wide-ranging brief, a ‘preliminary survey of possibilities of sabotage’ dated 31 May 1938. This consisted mainly of sabotage targets in Germany, including the electrical supply system, telephone communications, railways, ‘adulteration of food supplies’ and ‘Agriculture, by the introduction of pests to crops or diseases to animals’. There was also a category entitled ‘moral sabotage, by means of rumours, remarks causing dissatisfaction with the Nazi Party’. For this, Grand thought all that was required was ‘one man in every town with an automatic telephone exchange’, and suggested that, ‘as the activities of this branch will only be verbal, the Jews might be persuaded to produce an organisation in peace time which will be available for this work in war’. Sinclair accepted the scheme, warning him to exercise extreme caution to avoid diplomatic incidents and to concentrate in the first instance on cutting supplies to Germany of Swedish iron ore and Romanian oil. Menzies explained