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By Root 2555 0

from both London and agents across enemy lines. In early 1945 some thirteen SIS wireless sets were reporting from German-occupied territory. But, based now in the Netherlands itself, the SIS team were also able to exploit an unexpectedly rewarding new source by tapping into a Dutch electricity company’s private telephone network which had lines connecting company offices and the private homes of employees across the country. Using one of these private telephones in Allied-occupied territory, communication was established with points in the enemy-occupied zone, from which agents were able to provide a mass of tactical information with such speed that in a number of instances air strikes could be called up against the particular target reported. But casualties were especially heavy during the final campaign for the Netherlands. Of eighty-nine agents sent out from England, or infiltrated through enemy lines, thirty-nine were arrested and twenty-eight were shot or died in German captivity.

The Germans’ counter-attack in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge (their last major offensive of the war), launched on 16 December 1944, shook easy assumptions that the war was effectively over. For a moment it seemed as if the new Brussels station would have to be put on a renewed war footing. London instructed it to alert existing Belgian networks ‘with a view to creating strong stay-behind organisations’. Within hours Brussels had replied: ‘agents in situ, crystals issued and all sets working to Section VIII, who are requested to begin listening forthwith. Further teams being sent to Liège area.’ But the German offensive quickly ran out of steam and the stay-behind teams were not required. Marking the improved situation, at the start of February 1945 London cancelled the wireless plans and operator codes of no fewer than fourteen Belgian networks. Apart from attempts to penetrate Germany, the Brussels station thereafter turned to the demobilisation of wartime agents, liaison with the Sûreté and the question of an SIS peacetime set-up in the country.

Targeting Germany

When the Berlin station closed at the outbreak of the war, its residual functions had been transferred to London. Contact was lost with most of its agents, though a few of the better ones were reactivated after the war. A few German agents were already being run from London or from third countries and continued to be run, but with increased difficulty, during the war. By the spring of 1943 operations against Germany carried out from the United Kingdom had become the responsibility of the P.6 Section, acting partly as a station-in-waiting in London. This was led by Major Reginald Simon Gallienne, a Channel Islander who had studied French and German at Oxford and had then taught in Breslau (Wrocław), Germany, in the late 1930s and had joined SIS from the Intelligence Corps in July 1942 on appointment as P.6. Assisting him in the section were an old Germany hand and interwar veteran of the Service, and another officer, who had been born and educated in Hamburg, had worked as a chartered accountant and merchant banker specialising in Germany, and had joined SIS in late 1942.

During the autumn of 1944 the Service began to lay the basis for a reconstituted German section. In November the old Berlin station symbol, ‘12000’, was revived for the officer who had been P.6 since late June 1944. While he stayed in London, Lieutenant Colonel G. M. ‘Paul’ Paulson, with the ‘German’ designation ‘12600’, was posted from the SIS station in Paris to command No. 2 Intelligence Unit and make active preparations for penetrating Germany. P.6 officers looked for potential agents among German prisoners-of-war in the United Kingdom, targeting Communists, Social Democrats and others with less obvious reasons for opposing Nazism. But it was slow work and the returns were meagre, as a report in November 1944 made clear. Only four teams had been despatched. ‘Ewen’, a member of the Sudeten Social Democratic Party, had been ‘launched to Sudetenland from Adriatic’ in May 1944: ‘Nothing heard since