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By Root 2607 0

’s ‘organisation in the field was no more than a mirage created by the Gestapo’.6 In March 1942, following a wave of arrests, Claude Dansey began to worry about the SIS organisation in Belgium. He told Frederick Jempson (head of the Belgian Section in Broadway) that ‘unless some drastic steps are taken with or without the consent of [Fernand] Lepage [the London-based head of the Belgian Sûreté de l’État] you will soon be without any agents left in Belgium’. Dansey (wisely in the light of SOE’s experience) wanted to double-check whether any of SIS’s wireless operators had been compromised. Only then might they ‘devise some steps to save what is left’. But the news was not all bad. In April 1942 R. V. Jones in the Scientific Section noted that Jempson had produced two valuable reports, one of 17 February giving the position of the first known German Radio Direction Finding (RDF) station for controlling night fighters; and one of 28 March locating the first identified ‘decimetre’ directional wireless communications station in Belgium. Jones added that, ‘as all our attacks on the Ruhr’ had to pass through Jempson’s territory, ‘these constitute an important section of the main German air defence system and the more we know about them, the less our casualties’. Early the following year another agent, assisted by a compatriot employed in forced labour by the Germans building a new radar station at Lantin, near Liège, bribed his way into the building where over several nights he made detailed sketches and notes of all he saw. Supporting SIS’s case for a gallantry award after the war, the Air Ministry assessed his achievement as ‘making among the most outstanding air intelligence received during the war from clandestine sources’. This had enabled counter-measures to be developed which the ministry said saved ‘the lives of hundreds of Allied airmen and many of our night bombers’.7

The most successful Belgian network was Service Clarence, which was effectively administered by Hector Demarque after the First World War espionage veteran Walthère Dewé (‘Cleveland’) had been forced to keep a low profile. Dewé was later shot by the Germans while fleeing from arrest in January 1944. Clarence provided regular technical intelligence, including reports about the removal of uranium salts to Germany, and one agent working in a German headquarters near Breskens just across the Dutch frontier reported on German minefields and the disposition of enemy forces along the Belgian coast. A contact in a Belgian oil company provided not only information on military and other road traffic but also petrol and cars for the network to use. Information on enemy communications and movements, especially on the Belgian railway system, continued to be a priority target and, as in the First World War, Belgian agents produced most impressive results. Service Clarence, for example, continued to provide reports on the RAF bombing of German cities, including Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Cologne; intelligence on batteries at Zeebrugge and Ostend and on the defences at Knocke; and photographs of German anti-aircraft gunners, aerodromes and gun emplacements. The network also produced reports on V-weapons, including Peenemünde (4 January 1944), while from an entrepreneur working for the Germans and travelling in northern France an agent gleaned sightings of seventy-metre-long platforms (9 January 1944). Thereafter there were regular reports from Service Clarence on V-rockets.8 The ‘Luc’ network acquired information from the head office of Belgian State Railways and was able to give advance notice about the transport of German troops and equipment through Belgium and northern France. Luc agents also tapped into the State Railways’ private telephone system, as well as the teleprinter service between the State Railways and ‘the German Railway Transport Office which controlled the running of all military trains’.

The Belgian networks faced considerable problems in getting information out of the country. Towards the end of 1942 SIS began to send new ground-to-air ‘Ascension’ radio