The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [316]
Information on German deployment, coastal defences and communications in northern France, such as that provided by Dunderdale’s P.5 networks, was carefully assembled by section MI14 in the Directorate of Military Intelligence (for German order-of-battle information), and the Combined Intelligence Section (CIS) of General Headquarters, Home Forces, which had been given responsibility for collating all intelligence along a thirty-mile-deep coastal strip from Den Helder in the Netherlands to the mouth of the River Loire in France. From June 1942 to May 1944 CIS produced a series of weekly reports, code-named ‘Martian’, which systematically laid out the intelligence under seven headings: strategic survey; enemy forces; topography and maps; transport and industry; police and civilians; air; and naval. The reports were illustrated with aerial photographs, reproductions of documents and plans of coastal defences supplied by agents.19 From March 1944, MI14 began to issue more detailed ‘weekly notes’ or ‘weekly summaries’, classified ‘TOP SECRET(U)’, which provided a greater emphasis on German troop dispositions, general order of battle and the nature of fortifications on the northern French coast.20
In order to sustain the supply of tactical intelligence for the invasion forces during and immediately after Overlord, and aiming also to provide an alternative network in the tactical areas around the Normandy bridgehead should existing clandestine organisations fail as a result of enemy counter-measures, in late 1943 the ‘Sussex scheme’ was developed. This was a joint scheme between SIS, the American OSS and the Free French BCRA. Fifty intelligence targets were identified, half in the planned operational area of the British 21st Army Group and half in that of the United States forces. Each was to be covered by a French two-person team. But there were delays in assembling the agents and wireless operators, as not only had the BCRA in London to refer all matters to Algiers for a decision, but it had been decreed that General de Gaulle and his staff were not to be given details of Overlord until the actual day the invasion was launched. There were also problems with the personnel themselves. Just before Christmas 1943 Kenneth Cohen (Chief Staff Officer, Training, and chair of the inter-Allied Sussex Committee of Three running the scheme), complained to Tony Morris in Algiers that the men the Free French were supplying were of ‘low medical category or indifferent morale’ and that ‘at present rate we shall fail to implement our operational undertakings to the Chiefs of Staff, and responsibility for this will lie with the French’. For his part, Morris thought that ‘the whole B.C.R.A. attitude of mind seems to be much more directed towards internal politics and the Mouvements de Résistance than towards the collecting of military information’.
So concerned were Cohen’s committee about the risk of contacts with potentially compromised existing agent networks in France (and in keeping with the intense security maintained for all aspects of Overlord) that they considered the risky possibility of dropping the teams in blind. In the end, however, they decided to send in a preliminary ‘Pathfinder’ mission to prepare the way, when the twenty-five-year-old ‘Jeanette Gauthier’ was parachuted in on 6 February 1944. Based in Paris, she travelled west to Alençon, and south to Lyons, Bordeaux and Châteauroux, locating suitable dropping zones and arranging reception committees. Between February and April 1944 she personally met the first nine Sussex teams that parachuted into France and led them to safe houses in the Paris region.
Considerable effort was put into agent training,