The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [222]
Early wartime days
The first of a number of SIS withdrawals in the face of German advances during the war occurred from Poland in September 1939. On 1 September the Germans invaded. Two days later Britain and France declared war. German forces advanced so rapidly that on 5 September British diplomats, a military mission which had just arrived and the SIS station were all evacuated from Warsaw to Łuków, a small town fifty miles to the south-east. Here Sophie, the twenty-year-old wife of the SIS station chief, Major John Shelley (he was fifty-one), was killed in a German air raid. They had been married only since 21 February. Heading south towards the Romanian frontier, Shelley, using his secure SIS wireless, signalled London that ‘as matters here now look like becoming SAUVE QUI PEUT and this place will become extremely dangerous’, he had told the three female staff ‘to prepare to leave but they begged to remain’. Not everyone was as cool under fire as Shelley’s ‘three stout-hearted and courageous girls’. While the female staff could stay, Shelley asked permission to send home two male colleagues ‘who are quite useless in crisis [to] prevent panic and anxious to leave’. In fact they all escaped, with Shelley and his female secretaries reporting to Broadway on 28 September.1
In October 1939 the Polish intelligence service established its headquarters in Paris, but in the early summer of 1940 moved to London following the fall of France. In Paris a close liaison was established through the SIS station chief, Wilfred ‘Bill’ or ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale (nicknamed ‘Wilski’ by the Poles), who as head of the A.4 section at Broadway continued to be the chief SIS link with Polish intelligence after he too had to decamp from Paris to London. In Britain SIS offered financial, technical and logistical support, while the Poles (who had a very productive and extensive European-wide network of agents) agreed to pass on all the intelligence they acquired apart from any concerning internal Polish matters, an arrangement which, though not without its strains, worked thereafter to the great benefit of the Allied war effort.
For the SIS station in Helsinki across the Baltic Sea, the war effectively began on 21 August 1939 when more or less out of the blue the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was announced. This left the Finns to the mercy of their old enemies, the Russians, who invaded at the end of November. The Finns also felt badly let down by the Germans, which made it easier for Harry Carr, the long-serving SIS head of station, to work against both Germany and the Soviet Union. Carr’s formidable range of Finnish contacts included senior officers in Finnish Military Intelligence such as Colonel Reino Hallamaa, head of the Radio-Intercept and Cryptographic Branch. In January 1940 Menzies asked Carr to find out if the Finnish authorities had ‘procured any Soviet cryptographic material which could be communicated to us’. Carr immediately replied in the affirmative and it was arranged that Colonel John Tiltman of GC&CS should travel out to Finland, where he was presented by Hallamaa with a Red Army code-book taken off a dead Russian officer and which ‘bore the marks of a bullet’. GC&CS noted afterwards that it had been ‘of real assistance’ to their cryptographers.
During 1940 Finland became something of a refuge for intelligence people of various sorts. After the German invasion of Denmark on 10 April, Sidney Smith, just a fortnight after taking over as the SIS representative in Copenhagen, moved to Helsinki. Head Office had wanted him to be based in Stockholm, where he could keep in touch with his agents, but this was vetoed by both the minister, Victor Mallet, and the Stockholm SIS head of station on the grounds that it would cause ‘confusion’. With cover