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By Root 2755 0

the service ministries, which from May 1940 were also supplied to Desmond Morton for the Prime Minister. The available human intelligence fell into two main categories: detailed eyewitness observations of German operational preparations, and higher-level information, mostly from Berlin, about German strategic intentions. In July 1940 agents reported the arrival of paratroop battalions in Norway and Belgium, including a Landungskorps (special air landing force) which had been transferred from Austria. In September Menzies sent Morton (for Churchill) a very detailed series of reports from an A.4 agent who had just made his second visit to northern France. The agent had cycled along the north coast of Brittany and returned with maps showing German garrisons, gun-emplacements, airfields and troop concentrations, photographs of German activities at Douarnenez and Lorient, and reports of German soldiers practising amphibious landings. On into the autumn, agents’ reports confirmed the probability of an invasion. On 30 September fully equipped German troops were observed to have embarked on seven cargo ships at Bayonne, only to disembark two days later. On 20 October the German War Ministry ordered that three Einsatztruppe (special contingents) were to be despatched, one to Oslo and two to The Hague, each contingent being accompanied by two English-speaking interpreters. The Navy Section weekly summary for 21-28 October noted ships of four and five thousand tons lying in Hamburg harbour waiting to take on troops, and on 4 November a French agent watched a German invasion exercise at Étaples, using rubber boats with ten to twenty soldiers in each.

The best of the higher-level reports about possible invasion came from Menzies’s ‘very well placed and reliable German source’. This was ‘A.54’, Paul Thümmel, who had offered his services to the Czechoslovaks in 1936. They continued to run him, first from the Netherlands and later from London after Colonel František Moravec and the core of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service had been spirited out of Prague by SIS in March 1939. Thümmel was a well-placed Abwehr officer who was able to provide first-class intelligence (which came via Switzerland) about German capabilities and intentions.19 Between April and December 1940, designated ‘12022/A’ by SIS, he supplied at least fourteen reports specifically concerning the invasion question, and the way in which they were processed demonstrates how SIS broadly handled intelligence at this time. The subject matter was classified as political, which meant that the primary circulation of the material was to the relevant section of the Foreign Office, in this case the Central Department. Other copies (of which, apparently, no more than thirteen were made) were sent to the Permanent Under-Secretary (who was only personally sent reports judged to be of special importance, and internal evidence suggests were for him to show to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax), the PUS’s private secretary (who was sent copies of all reports), Major Morton (for the Prime Minister) and the service departments. The only copies of the reports which have survived are those sent to Morton and which he (as required) returned to SIS.

Thümmel’s first mention of an assault on Britain was in ‘an unavoidably delayed report’ of 2 May, circulated on 19 May 1940. ‘Intense preparations for air attacks on England’, he warned, ‘are proceeding,’ but the invasion itself had ‘been postponed, because all available troops are being used in Norway’. In July he reported that the invasion had been further postponed pending clarification of Soviet intentions in the Balkans. On 13 August SIS circulated a report which had been received ‘within the last few days’ from their ‘very well placed German source’. It asserted that the attack on Britain was ‘not to be expected within the next fourteen days’. An expeditionary force was being assembled in Paris, Brussels and The Hague, but the troops would not be ready for at least three weeks. This intelligence was clearly of interest at the highest level.