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SIS’s thinking on this matter to French opposite numbers in February 1939. He was, he said, convinced of the need to use both propaganda and terrorism against Germany and Italy, just as they were planning to do against France and England. He admitted that there was currently no effective English propaganda in Germany, but that there were plans to distribute twenty thousand anti-Nazi ‘tracts’ in envelopes mailed in Germany and also to develop a German-language radio service to broadcast truthful news bulletins specially chosen to influence German public opinion. As to sabotage, SIS had been studying the subject for more than a year and Menzies believed that, in time of conflict, ‘acts of terrorism’ would ‘crystallise’ opposition to the Nazi regime and profoundly disrupt military and economic life in Germany. Potential targets (such as factories and communications) had already been identified, as had the personnel to mount attacks (for example Communists and anarchists).38

SIS’s concern with enemy special operations led them to consider possible biological

attacks on the United Kingdom. Illustrating more innocent days, this paper reveals

that in 1939 even the Prime Minister got a doorstep milk delivery.

SIS’s consideration of offensive sabotage operations clearly also informed thinking about the defensive side. In July 1938 Sinclair sent Ismay ‘Scheme D’, some notes prepared by Section IX ‘on the protection against sabotage of power stations and H/T [high-tension] transmission lines’. The following August he sent him a paper on bacteriological warfare, which reflected further work in Grand’s section. The ‘possibilities of this form of warfare’, it asserted, ‘may have been under-rated, especially the destruction of our flocks by anthrax or foot and mouth disease, also the contamination of our water and milk supply’. Various scenarios were raised: ‘Can, say, one hundred Nazi agents supplied with bacteriological material and operating in the London Underground Railways during the rush hours, start a serious epidemic in London?’ Reflecting a more innocent age, when even the prime minister had a conventional, daily doorstep milk delivery, the memorandum asked: ‘Is the Prime Minister’s (or any other persons’ of national importance) milk boiled before use? (Milk bottles on doorsteps can be tampered with.)’

By 1939 Section IX had established a presence at Bletchley to develop sabotage material, including incendiaries, plastic explosives and fuses. Among the various sabotage plans against German targets were the destruction of lock gates on the Kiel Canal and the ‘possibility of placing mustard gas on the seats of the [Berlin] Opera House before a major Nazi rally’. Over the summer of 1939 British yachtsmen were sent to reconnoitre beaches for clandestine landings from Trondheim to the Franco-Belgian frontier. D Section’s activities abroad, especially contacting and briefing foreign nationals, were sometimes done with scant reference to security, and alarmed a number of British diplomatic missions. There was also a potential overlap between it and the War Office Section GSR (later to become MIR, Military Intelligence Research), which had been created essentially for the same purpose. Both organisations, for example, were planning the sabotage of the Romanian oil route up the Danube. Grand was also keen on propaganda, ‘but here again enthusiasm seems to have run away with discretion’ and there was overlap with the government’s ‘official’ covert propaganda organ, the Enemy Publicity Section at Electra House on the Victoria Embankment.

SIS played an important part in the development of clandestine air photography. Towards the end of 1938 Winterbotham’s Section II set up an Air Photographic Unit. This was an Anglo-French joint SIS-Deuxième Bureau venture with business cover as the Aeronautical Research and Sales Corporation. An American Lockheed plane was purchased by the French, and SIS engaged an Australian pilot, Sidney Cotton. Cotton and his team developed cutting-edge photographic techniques for air reconnaissance which