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By Root 2872 0

April 1944 SHAEF, suggesting that likely victims might include Rommel, Rundstedt and possibly also Vichy collaborators, asked the Foreign Office to raise the matter with SIS (and curiously not with SOE). Menzies wanted clearer guidance as to what precisely was required, but, assuming ‘that they must be thinking of the removal between now and D. Day of personalities whose liquidation might actually assist the Overlord operation’, he said that ‘the compiling of lists would seem to be a fairly simple matter’. Nevertheless he was worried that any such action ‘might automatically lead to reprisals against hostages or United Nations personnel in enemy hands’, and wished to know ‘exactly what effects it is hoped to attain by the action proposed’. SHAEF came back with the proposal that, rather than German military commanders, the sorts of people they had in mind were ‘para-military and civilian German personnel in key positions in France whose removal at the critical moment might really be a blow to the German war effort’. These might include ‘Abwehr and S.D. [Sicherheitsdienst] characters, important political figures, transport chiefs, heads of supply and other economic organisations etc’. They did not want any French names, as they were ‘strongly in favour of leaving it to French resisters to select their own victims’.23

On 11 May Menzies told Peter Loxley that while SIS had prepared a list of possible targets (which he was not as yet forwarding to him), the Service did not believe that their removal would ‘have much, or indeed any effect on the efficient functioning of so widespread and highly organised a machine’ as the Germans had in France. He also recommended that Loxley consult Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, on the matter. Cavendish-Bentinck agreed with Menzies ‘in disliking this scheme, not out of squeamishness, as there are several people in this world whom I could kill with my own hands with a feeling of pleasure and without that action in any way spoiling my appetite’, but because it was ‘the type of bright idea which in the end produces a good deal of trouble and does little good’. Above all there was the risk of bloody reprisals. Nevertheless, if the French liked ‘to assassinate Germans or collaborators’, he added, ‘we should not deter them’, but ‘we should steer clear of this business’ and ‘should not ourselves designate persons to be liquidated, either German or still less French’. He noted the likelihood ‘that for every successful assassination’ there would be ‘two or three failures’ and observed that ‘if assassination were easy many statesmen and high officers would have come to a violent end’. Looking to the future, Cavendish-Bentinck worried that if German civilian officials were murdered in France, it would ‘probably start a wave of murderings’ which might continue after the British had occupied enemy territory, ‘with the result that members of our Control and other Commissions will become poor risks for the insurance companies’. Cadogan shared these negative opinions and SHAEF were informed accordingly.24

SIS’s part in Overlord drew on its experience in North Africa and the Middle East and reflected the successful organisation which had been developed there in 1942-3. Thus, as well as the Sussex teams, echoing SIS’s No. 1 Intelligence Unit which had been attached to Alexander’s 15th Army Group in Italy, No. 2 Intelligence (Unit) Section (or, more succinctly, but no more revealingly, No. 2 I(U) Section) was attached to the headquarters of General Montgomery’s British 21st Army Group, and provided the link to SHAEF on intelligence matters, both with London and in the field. On 8 June Menzies appointed Colonel Guy Westmacott to take over the section, with an officer who had hitherto been running the Sussex programme as his deputy. In a move that signalled the start of the Service’s anticipated peacetime deployment in formerly occupied Europe, the deputy was given the symbol ‘27000’, which belonged to the head of the Paris station. He was charged with obtaining