The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [227]
An SIS agent arrested in Switzerland in October 1939, while under interrogation, had already blown Dansey’s cover as Z. So concerned was Dansey to secure this agent’s release that in late November 1939 (before Menzies’s official appointment as Chief ) he personally visited the President of the Board of Trade and got Gladwyn Jebb to see Sir Horace Wilson at the Treasury in order to sanction some sort of trade deal with the Swiss - a suggestion was an increase in the import quota of watches from £30,000 to £50,000. Dansey had good reason to be nervous, as the arrested agent alleged that he had received all his instructions from him (Dansey). ‘Why this gratuitous lie’, fumed Dansey, ‘when I had only just been put in touch with him I cannot understand.’ Dansey’s own Swiss sources now said that it was too dangerous for them to meet him in public as he was effectively ‘brûlé’ (blown). After discussions with a Swiss intermediary a deal was struck and the agent released and returned to England.
The possibilities for establishing robust networks of agents targeting Germany and Italy, which had originally been the main purpose of the Z Organisation, markedly deteriorated after the war had begun. Already highly sensitive about their neutrality, the Swiss made life difficult for all the foreign intelligence services operating in their country: French, German and Italian, as well as British. Early in 1940, they successfully penetrated the SIS Zurich station with a Swiss national who had been living in London and had applied for permission to return home, upon which the Z Organisation promptly recruited him without any apparent preparation to work in Switzerland. But he revealed himself to the Swiss authorities, who used him to keep tabs on SIS, a role he played for some time until his case-officer was alerted to his duplicity by an anonymous informant. It is scarcely possible that this man was recruited without Dansey being consulted, but the manner in which he was engaged is of a piece with the hasty quest for personnel in the difficult early wartime days.
Matters were not improved by the refusal of Dansey to permit his officers to do any counter-espionage work or of Valentine Vivian to deploy anyone from Section V in Switzerland. One officer, posted to Switzerland towards the end of the war, afterwards asserted that this was principally due to the personal antagonism between the two men, ‘who were at no time on speaking terms throughout the war, a deplorable state of affairs’. Another difficulty with the Swiss operation concerned communications. There was an SIS wireless set at Geneva, but it could be used only for receiving messages as the Swiss authorities did not permit foreign missions in the country to send enciphered messages except through the Swiss Post Office. Before the fall of France messages went in a diplomatic bag through Paris, and after May 1940 it was possible for British members of the mission who had diplomatic status and were over the age of forty-five to travel through Vichy France to Spain and Portugal and thence by plane to London. This ceased after the Germans occupied Vichy in November 1942, but it was thereafter found possible to bribe South American diplomats to carry the bags out. ‘Two journeys and retire for life’ was the saying. For additional security, letters for the diplomatic bags were sewn into their envelopes. Cypher telegrams could still be sent, but SIS had to use one-time pads for this, which, as Switzerland became more isolated, came to be in very short supply, as getting