The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [234]
By late June 1940 the War Office was urging SIS to get agents into France as soon as possible. Clandestine pick-up operations and insertions started as early as 18 June, when Major Norman Hope of Section D led an abortive mission to rescue General de Gaulle’s wife. On 23 June, three men were landed on the French coast to ascertain the morale of the people. But, as Major Hubert Hatton-Hall, head of SIS’s Army Section, argued, wherever the target area was, the ‘important thing is to enlist agents who belong to those areas & who know their way about & to provide them with WT communications’. None of this could be magicked out of thin air, but in late July Commander Frank Slocum’s new Operations Section landed Dunderdale’s first A.4 agent, a young cavalry cadet called Hubert Moreau, the son of a French admiral, near Douarnenez in western Brittany. Moreau stayed for four days, and, operating out of Mylor Creek in Falmouth Harbour, Cornwall, he went on to make two more trips in August and September.14 Above and beyond whatever intelligence was acquired, the expeditions demonstrated that, although difficult, it was possible to infiltrate agents by sea, and contacts made in these early days contributed to the marine reporting system which developed along the French coast.
Evidently hoping to raise spirits at Christmas 1940, this letter from Menzies to Archie Boyle of Air Intelligence, asserts that the festival had been abolished ‘by German authority’.
Clandestine landing by sea was not the only option and on 20 August 1940 the Royal Air Force formed No. 419 Flight at the North Weald fighter station to assist in the delivery and extraction of SIS (and SOE) agents in enemy territory. New aviation techniques had to be learned by the unit employing the limited available aircraft (obsolete Whitley bombers and army-support Lysanders). The first attempted operation pre-dated the formation of the flight by several days. In a report prepared in April 1942 Claude Dansey summarised it: ‘In August, 1940, our first effort was made of landing an agent by Lysander. We were inexperienced, we were groping in the dark, and the first essay was a failure. What happened has never been known with exactitude as the plane did not return and we never heard of the agent or his wireless set.’ It was a bad start but things soon improved; for the period October 1940 to August 1941, ninety operations were planned, of which forty-eight were cancelled before take-off. Of the remaining forty-two, four were unsuccessfully attempted, with the remaining thirty-eight involving the delivery of fifty-seven agents and the return of eighteen with the loss of three aircraft. It was not just a case of transporting people and delivering supplies; the operations were able to bring important documents back to Britain from the field.
Through the summer and autumn of 1940, the intelligence return was nevertheless disappointing. In November all three service liaison officers in SIS complained about the meagre product. The head of the Air Section, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham, declared that ‘with the exception of some reports from deserters and Free Frenchmen who have managed to get across to England, reports from agents on the German Air Force in France and Belgium have been practically nil’. Dansey responded by saying that to give a list of agents put back into occupied France would convey ‘little or nothing’ in itself, though it ‘would show a record of disappointments’. The main problem was one of communications; satisfactory radio links had not yet been established and other means of communication, for example through Switzerland, meant that information when received was ‘completely stale’.
Matters had improved by early 1941, when Dunderdale’s organisation had agents and postboxes in occupied and unoccupied France. One important network (code-named ‘Fitzroy’ and later ‘Jade’) was set up by Claude Lamirault, who had been active in prewar extreme right-wing and anti-Communist circles.