The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [232]
The SIS operation in Belgium, which had been under heavy pressure in the immediate prewar period, expanded rapidly after the outbreak of the war. Under what was known as the ‘13124 Plan’, Edward Calthrop, the head of station and Passport Control Officer in Brussels, began to recruit agents initially in the east of the country to give warning of any concentration of German troops across the frontier. Should Belgium be invaded it was hoped that the network could continue as a stay-behind organisation. The head agent was the sixty-year-old Walthère Dewé, who had run the celebrated Dame Blanche organisation during the First World War. His agents in 1940 seem to have been well selected and at least two of them survived to operate after Belgium was occupied. They were given radio transmitters and some rudimentary Morse code training, and were instructed to send their signals blind. Confirmation of receipt was to be provided through coded messages in talks and poetry readings broadcast by Radio des Beaux-Arts, an SIS Section VIII venture operating from England but ‘purporting to be a small broadcasting station financed by philanthropic old Belgian ladies desiring to bring something of beauty to an ugly war clouded world’. Sustaining this fiction proved difficult after the occupation as the technicians in Britain had to make sure that their transmissions did not overrun the German-directed electric power cuts imposed across Belgium. This perhaps over-elaborate system was not a great success, but Gambier-Parry extracted two useful lessons from the experience. ‘Ab initio training of an agent who had no knowledge whatever of signalling’ was not ‘a practical proposition’, and personnel would have to be recruited for wireless communications in the field with some existing signalling experience. The second lesson was that stay-behind schemes were inherently problematic. Gambier-Parry noted that the operation planned in Belgium ‘under pre-invasion conditions suffered the handicap that these conditions became revolutionised after occupation by the enemy’, and that the ‘subsequent infiltration’ of agents was a much more successful procedure. Inevitably this was fraught with danger. The first agent, Henri Leenaerts, was flown in on 18 August 1940, but the Lysander which carried him was unable to land and was lost on the return flight, killing the pilot and agent.
In fact, the most productive source of intelligence from inside occupied Belgium came from a partial revival of La Dame Blanche under Dewé, who ran a network successively called ‘Cleveland’ and later ‘Service Clarence’ until he was captured and shot by the Germans in 1944. Their intelligence covered a broad range of subjects, including information on aircraft hangars; troop and train movements; the state of Belgian industry; reports on the movement of munitions and munitions depots in Belgium (as well as some in neighbouring Germany); drawings of fortifications around Zeebrugge; and reports on the effects of local RAF attacks on German defences in the Low Countries.12 In May 1941 it was reported that the Cleveland organisation was ‘the only one now working in Belgium’, but by the end of the year three further networks had been established with courier lines working into Spain. These doubled as escape lines for British service personnel, which, although important