The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [226]
Section D’s incompetence in Sweden was one of the factors undermining Laurence Grand’s position back home and contributing to the creation of SOE as an independent agency. Martin never lost his antipathy to special operations, and the situation in Sweden illustrates SIS-SOE relations at their worst. In March 1941, for example, after the arrest of three SOE Norwegian agents, Martin complained to Menzies that he considered ‘activities of S.O. organization having serious results and impairing our relations with Swedes . . . [It] embarrasses me and increases my difficulties. They cross my lines and tap my resources with resulting serious confusion.’ Menzies, in turn, asked Frank Nelson at SOE to ‘consider issuing instructions for your people to lie low and to act with the utmost discretion for the time being’.
The fall of Denmark and Norway in 1940, and the expulsion of the British from Finland in 1941, meant that by the beginning of 1942 Sweden had become a hive of SIS activity. Additional staff were sent in, and sub-stations opened in Malmö and Gothenburg. From the capital, albeit under very close Swedish surveillance, Martin’s Stockholm station worked Swedish and Danish cases, and assisted with Norwegian operations, while Harry Carr’s Helsinki station-in-exile worked Finnish and Baltic cases. The most important of the Norwegian operations involved contact from November 1941 with scientists who had access to valuable intelligence on German progress towards an atomic bomb.
Despite this activity, London wanted more from Stockholm, and in February 1942 Menzies told Martin that he was ‘seriously alarmed at lack of [military, naval and air] information from first hand sources in North Germany, German Baltic ports and Denmark’, and that he hoped that under Carr’s supervision ‘a service to North Germany and Denmark’ might be worked up, both directly and through the Baltic states. Martin continued to have problems, not all of his own making. In April 1942 the head agent of the Czechoslovak intelligence service (run by the Czechoslovaks from the UK), along with three members of his network, was arrested. The Czechoslovaks reported, using their own code, through the SIS Stockholm station. Among the documents captured were their coding materials and, having read all their back telegrams, the Swedes took particular exception to one message referring to the possibility of sending typhus-infected lice into Germany, as they naturally felt their position would be badly compromised if the Germans got to hear of it. Martin, of course, suspected the hand of SOE behind it, and so, indeed, it turned out, SOE being in touch with at least two of those arrested. The press coverage in Sweden was considerable and Mallet was once more embarrassed.
In December 1942 Martin was replaced as Passport Control Officer by Cyril Cheshire (a fluent Russian-speaking timber merchant in civilian life), who, in the undoubtedly more favourable circumstances of 1943-5, markedly increased the productivity of the Stockholm station. Martin had certainly been under very heavy pressure in 1939-42, and he bore the brunt of the move from a peacetime to a war footing, along with the burden of coping with the fallout from the early excesses of Section D and SOE. Under the circumstances he seems to have kept his head remarkably well, and he also retained the confidence of the minister, which was no mean achievement.
Switzerland
In September 1939 SIS had a station in Geneva, headed by a Passport Control Officer, with an assistant and a wireless operator. Following the outbreak of war, however, Claude Dansey and the greater part of his Z Organisation relocated from London to Switzerland, which was believed to be a better base for penetrating Germany. Dansey and at least four colleagues initially set up rather insecurely in a Zurich hotel, where Dansey had to warn his staff, ‘Don’t call me colonel.’ Eventually the team was given cover as the visa section of the Zurich consulate, with