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that there will be room for two secret British organisations in Europe once hostilities have ceased. Nor could he agree that after that date there should be any underground British organisation which is not responsible to the Foreign Secretary.’ Cadogan conceded that SOE might not ‘necessarily come to an abrupt end as soon as we sign an Armistice’, but, ‘as and when hostilities terminate in different parts of the world, any S.O.E. representatives who may remain in Government service should be transferred to the War Office if they are to perform any overt duties with the military’ or ‘to the S.I.S. if they are to perform underground work’. Although SOE was strenuously to resist this conclusion, so, in fact, it was to be.

Section VIII

During the difficult early years of the war, one area of undoubted SIS achievement was that of wireless communications. Much of the credit for this was due to CSC, the Controller Special Communications, Richard Gambier-Parry, who from early 1938 had built up a remarkable team (styling themselves ‘plumbers’) in his new Communications Section VIII. As is so often the case with committed technical experts, he was something of a monomaniac. Like Laurence Grand, he was a fertile source of ideas and also impatient with what he regarded as pettifogging administrative matters. But, unlike Grand, Gambier-Parry was crucially and manifestly able to convert his inspirations and imagination into practical achievements, so much so that during the war he was asked to take on a considerable amount of work for departments other than SIS. In 1940 Admiral Godfrey singled out Gambier-Parry’s section for particular praise and in January 1941 Sir David Petrie (later head of MI5) noted ‘the very efficient wireless installation maintained by M.I.6’.40 Beyond providing for SIS communications at home (for example between headquarters and outstations such as Bletchley Park) and abroad (both to foreign stations and individual agents), as well as those of SOE (to 1942) and various Allied governments-in-exile, Gambier-Parry became responsible for a dedicated secure communications network designed to carry SIS traffic (including the signals intelligence produced by GC&CS) to customer departments in government and the armed services, as well as both King George VI’s and the Prime Minister’s communications when they were abroad. On Petrie’s recommendation, in May 1941 he took on the Radio Security Service, previously run by the General Post Office under War Office and MI5 direction, which had been formed to intercept and collect foreign communications, as well as locating their source - providing some of the vital raw material for the GC&CS code-breakers. After the war, a GC&CS historian remarked that the transfer of the work to SIS ‘at last’ established it ‘on a durable basis’, and ensured ‘wholehearted technical support’.41 Gambier-Parry also set up and ran several transmitting stations for the propaganda output of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Political Warfare Executive, including what was called Freiheit (Freedom) Radio. Supporting all this was a research and development branch devoted to (among other things) producing robust and reliable wireless sets for use in the field, and a training school at Hans Place in London which processed over 600 operators.42

At the start of the war Section VIII, as a non-military organisation, suffered in terms of priority for equipment and personnel. There was also a security aspect, with questions being raised locally as to what the two hundred or so civilians based at Whaddon Hall were actually doing. In common with SIS itself, in July 1940 Section VIII acquired a military cover name and became known as No. 1 Special Signal Unit. Reflecting the difficulties of creating really good cover, the acronym SSU was quickly found to be less than satisfactory, as some inquisitive outsiders interpreted ‘SS’ as ‘Secret Service’. Others did not like the ‘SS’ echo of the hated German Schutzstaffel, and so in 1941 the designation was changed to SCU: Special Communication Unit.

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