The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [225]
The most sustained demand for Norwegian intelligence came from the Admiralty, who wanted rapid information about German naval movements along the coast. Trondheim became particularly important after the main German battle fleet was based there in January 1942. In April the newly appointed Deputy Director/Navy, John Cordeaux, complained that ‘we are very scantily served at present in Norway, being represented only in Bodo, Trondheim, Bergen and Oslo’, but efforts to recruit and infiltrate more agents brought a marked improvement over the following year. The need to provide coverage for the Admiralty at Kirkenes on the Russian frontier in the far north-west of Norway (where there was a U-boat base) led to a disastrous co-operative venture with the Russians. Two SIS agents equipped with radios were flown by Catalina flying boat to an airbase at Lake Latkha in Russia in August 1942. The Russians had agreed to receive the agents and drop them by parachute near Kirkenes. Far from despatching them within days, as promised, the Russians held the agents incommunicado for two months and then dropped them, with only their summer equipment, in Finland instead of Norway. They were quickly apprehended and handed over to the Germans who brought them to Oslo, where they were interrogated under torture and shot. ‘I am’, minuted Cordeaux in October 1943, ‘most distressed to read this dreadful story and of course now bitterly regret that we attempted cooperation with the Russians.’
The German conquest of Norway not only brought the hitherto rather poorly resourced SIS station in Sweden into the front line, but it also naturally heightened the Swedes’ vigilance concerning any foreign clandestine activities which might threaten their neutrality.4 Besides, as with other European neutrals in the early years of the war, while there were undoubtedly individuals with pro-British leanings, there were also many pro-Germans in Sweden. The station chief in 1939, Lieutenant Commander John Martin, had no more than ten regular agents and sub-agents on his books, with four more on probation. Early in 1940 a group of Section D agents, primarily gathering shipping intelligence for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, were arrested, and all were sentenced to prison terms of hard labour ranging from eight to fifteen months.5
Worse was to come. In April 1940 an SIS Section D team was uncovered by the Swedes. They were operating under business cover and aiming to sabotage northern Swedish port installations handling iron-ore exports to Germany, an operation specifically urged by Churchill. The leader of the group, A. D. Rickman (who had attracted the attention of the Swedish Security Service by his contacts with German émigré journalists), was arrested and a mass of compromising material found in his flat, including fifty-three kilos of gelignite, detonators and electric timing devices. The minister, Victor Mallet, complained to London that ‘our sleuths seem to be thoroughly bad at their job: so far they have achieved little in Sweden beyond putting me and themselves in an awkward position’. Martin was not at all happy either. ‘Frankly I feel very bitter after all the hard work and time I have given up to help them’, he cabled London, ‘that they should, by their own negligence or inefficiency or both, have compromised me like this.’ The Rickman debacle, moreover, demoralised Martin’s most important single Swedish source, who had been reporting on the information revealed to the Swedes by Rickman and his associates. ‘Effect of this case on source deplorable,’ wrote Martin. ‘He stated frankly that previously he felt he was working with people who knew their job