The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [201]
Godfrey’s third priority was for information about German submarine construction, as he was ‘still without information whether Germany is embarking on a large U-boat ship building programme, or is going into mass production, or is devoting her resources to other things’. He complained, too, that he found himself ‘in great difficulties when asked, as I am, for information on this subject, as it is extremely difficult to say why it cannot be obtained’. The fourth priority was the ‘state of readiness of German Naval units’, which he recognised was ‘a difficult thing to find out’. Fifth was ‘the progress and state of completion of the [German battleship] BISMARCK and other ships building and projected’. ‘Will the BISMARCK be completed early or late next year? Our own big-shipbuilding programme is based on the answer to this question. If early, KG5 [the battleship King George V] and other ships must be accelerated and work on smaller units correspondingly retarded. These’, he added, ‘are obviously decisions of the greatest national importance.’ Finally he wanted information on German mines. The Germans, he asserted, had ‘invented a new and particularly vicious mine, probably on the magnetic principle’. If one of these could be obtained, or drawings of one, ‘we could without doubt produce the antidote’. ‘Money cannot possibly be any object when approaching this problem, as our daily losses are formidable and show no diminution. The matter is one of the most vital importance and I am constantly being bombarded with demands for information which I cannot satisfy.’
Godfrey’s shopping list was a real challenge to SIS, which, alas, was unable to be of much immediate help, though the Naval Section insisted that forty-nine (not three) Norwegian reports had been received and an observation report on the Bismarck had been made on 11 November. It is clear that in this respect the loss of TR/16 was a grievous blow. A German magnetic mine was, however, obtained, but not by SIS. On 23 November a mine dropped by a German aircraft off Shoeburyness on the Thames estuary was recovered and dissected, after which effective counter-measures were developed.12 Even when good intelligence was acquired, it was not always believed. One example cited concerned drawings that were passed to the Admiralty early in 1939 purporting to be a new type of German torpedo. The Admiralty dismissed these as fabrications, but in May 1940 the Director of Naval Intelligence admitted that a captured German torpedo was ‘practically the same as that shown on the drawings sent by S.I.S. early last year’.
The Hankey review
In December 1939 the inquiry mooted at the time of Menzies’s appointment was entrusted to Lord Hankey with Sir Alexander Cadogan’s private secretary, Gladwyn Jebb, as secretary. Like previous private secretaries to the Permanent Under-Secretary, Jebb was a crucial linking figure between the Foreign Office and clandestine agencies. Hankey’s son, Christopher, ‘took the minutes of all the meetings’,13 and his notes of the evidence from the main customer departments give a vivid picture of how secret intelligence was processed and how SIS was generally regarded in early 1940.
At the beginning of February Hankey interviewed Godfrey, and this in particular allows us to see how matters had advanced over the ten weeks or so since the DNI had written to Menzies. Liaison between the Admiralty and SIS had improved with the secondment of two officers to the Service