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By Root 2603 0

‘P.M. saw Lord Halifax’s copy,’ noted Morton. On 19 September Thümmel reported that the ‘fact that the attack on Britain had not yet taken place’ was ‘due chiefly to weather conditions and secondly to the British air raids’. This report was circulated on 21 September, just two days after being made, a remarkably quick process repeated in the next report, five days later, which also put the delay down to bad weather. By October Thümmel was reporting that the attack would not now be until ‘early 1941’, and on 28 December, having been present at a speech given by Field Marshal Keitel (Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht - the German Armed Forces High Command), he said that Hitler had decided on a spring invasion of Britain, perhaps at the end of March 1941. Keitel also forecast an attack on Greece in support of the Italians, but ‘said he would let the Italians stew till the spring as the main German purpose was to syphon off British troops from North Africa’.

Thümmel was not the only person reporting about Germany in 1940. Regular reports on morale and other matters were assembled from a number of sources. A report in September contained information from two ‘North Europeans’ (most probably Swedes), who had visited Berlin, and an ‘eminent Swiss physician’, who had visited Munich and Vienna. A ‘German manufacturer who arrived in Budapest from Hamburg’ had said that the shipbuilding yards of Blohm and Voss had been completely destroyed by air raids. The following month a report entitled ‘Germany: miscellaneous indications’ drew on information from ‘a Swede of standing, who has many friends in Berlin’, ‘a traveller of Austrian nationality, of a Swiss firm’, ‘the correspondent in Finland of an important German newspaper’ who had just spent a month in Germany and ‘a well placed neutral in Berlin’. These people were not ‘agents’, as the report explained; all their information had been acquired ‘by trustworthy indirect means, i.e. none of these individuals is a conscious source of ours’. The SIS team in Switzerland were always on the lookout for information. Late in 1940 the Geneva station was advised that an employee of the United States embassy in Berlin would shortly be visiting Switzerland. ‘She should only be asked to give information about conditions in Germany,’ came the instruction, ‘and not asked to work for us.’ Hard military information was the most difficult intelligence to acquire. On 27 December 1940 Malcolm Woollcombe noted: ‘It is piteous to find ourselves in this state of ignorance’ about events and production inside Germany. Nevertheless, one agent did get through at this dark hour, a Yugoslav ex-naval officer, ‘Rauf ’, who had been recruited in Trieste. Rauf visited Berlin in late 1940 and (according to his postwar medal citation, now the only record of his work) reported on the Junkers aircraft factory, and also ‘gave important information on a newly-established aerodrome in the vicinity’.

Menzies’s response to an enquiry about the identity of the German propaganda broadcaster, ‘Lord Haw Haw’.

Iberia

Once the Germans had occupied western France down to the Pyrenees and the Spanish frontier, it was widely feared that Spain would be their next victim. The right-wing government of General Franco, moreover, provided an accommodating environment for pro-German groups and SIS found itself having to devote considerable efforts to counter-espionage work. There was also the problem of dealing with Sir Samuel Hoare, ambassador in Madrid from June 1940 to December 1944, whose prickly combination of knowledge and authority (as both a former Foreign Secretary and a former intelligence officer) with a tendency to windy overreaction made him a difficult colleague. This was demonstrated in September 1940 after Hoare was told by his own ‘secret sources’ of an alleged ‘confession’ to the Spanish Security Police by three men posing as Belgians that they were British agents working for the Passport Control Officer (and SIS representative). Although the men were ‘plants’, apparently engineered by Falangist (Spanish Fascist)