• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2660 0

south-east Europe was in Athens, where the Passport Control Officer and head of station had over a dozen staff and seventy salaried agents (whose retainers ranged from £1 to £200 per month, with the majority receiving between £10 and £20). Assessing the Athens operation early in 1940, Captain Cuthbert Bowlby, a sailor who had joined the Service in 1938 and had become head of the Middle East Section, noted that the station ‘must be considered from rather a different angle than others’ since ‘in dealing with Greeks it is no exaggeration to say that to be a S[ecret] S[ervice] agent is quite a normal profession, a situation which must make it difficult to get an agent to do more than a certain amount for a certain sum of money. It follows, therefore, that if you want big results you must pay well.’1

From the start of the war until the summer of 1940 the main intelligence requirements from the region were political and economic, the former to underpin the broad British policy of securing a neutral Balkan bloc of countries which together might resist Axis advances, the latter to reinforce the economic blockade which the more optimistic British strategists hoped would help cripple the German war effort.2 Exchanges between Bucharest and London about a potential new agent reveal the sort of thing that was required early in the war. In September 1939 Archie Gibson reported that a local commercial traveller in medical goods was an excellent prospect as he could legitimately visit Germany. But London did not want just any old information. ‘General observations on countryside, or local gossip from doctors and chemists useless’, they signalled. ‘Information German activities must be directly or indirectly from inside German organisations and must be confined to specific items, with in each case expressly specified sub-sources.’ There was also a note of requirements from the Ministry of Economic Warfare, who wanted information on ‘details and quantities of commodities passing to and from Germany, distinguishing between rail and Danube traffic’. London did not rate the political reporting from Romania very highly. Gibson’s own recruits were described as ‘mostly local journalists’, who were ‘fairly prolific’, but ‘their output on the whole is worthless. They are occasionally right, as often fantastically wrong, their subsources are vague and nebulous, and we are never in a position to say what, if any, weight can be attached to anything they report.’ In February 1940, when Gibson reported a potentially promising contact with Hermann von Ritgen, the German press counsellor in Bucharest, David Footman in London warned (with Venlo undoubtedly in mind) that ‘personal contact in wartime between one of our representatives (even one without official cover) and a senior member of the staff of a German legation is a very delicate matter. It may well result in an exceptional coup or in a first-class flop.’ Later information suggested that Ritgen, a ‘Nazi agent and propagandist’, was himself probably aiming to penetrate SIS, and Gibson was briskly told to ‘discontinue contact’.

In 1939-40 Laurence Grand’s Section D worked on schemes to deny Romanian oil and other strategic supplies to the Germans, both by direct action in the Ploeşti oilfield north of Bucharest (which supplied 20 per cent of Germany’s prewar needs) and also by blocking the Danube at the Iron Gates, where the river cut through the Carpathian Mountains and for three miles flowed through a narrow gorge along the Romanian-Yugoslav frontier. Grand’s chief local expert, Julius Hanau (rather obviously code-named ‘Caesar’), the Belgrade representative of the British engineering firm Vickers, devised a scheme to blow up the cliffs at the gorge, and, when this was thwarted by the vigilance of the local police, proposed in May 1940 to sink barges carrying cement and scrap iron, crewed by Section D men, which would block the river for an estimated three months. Hanau was active elsewhere, and in February 1940 George Rendel, the British minister in Sofia, complained that he had been in Bulgaria