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involved in proceedings to put these rumours down, (which she threatens to do) we should not make the facts known officially for the sake of the children’. He added that the death could be made to look like suicide, as ‘the body was in fact found in the sea, and the newspapers of the time put it down as suicide’. On instructions from London, 27000 told Madame Bla ‘that we had irrefutable evidence that her husband, after his arrest by the Germans, accepted to work for them’. He had been ‘contacted again by us (I purposely did not indicate whether the “us” was 99532 [Alliance] organisation or S.I.S.) in Marseille, and admitted his guilt and committed suicide’. He added that any attempt to clear Bla’s name ‘must end in disaster’. If Madame Bla ‘kept quiet, nobody but ourselves would know the truth and her name and that of her children would be saved’. Sympathetically (if somewhat disingenuously, as he was also clearly concerned about protecting SIS’s reputation), 27000 added that ‘the main thing was to prevent her children and his family in [the] U.K. from learning of his downfall’.

Priorities and practices

In intelligence matters, as in other spheres, British (and Allied) attitudes towards Germany at the end of the war were very much coloured by memories and lessons learned from the First World War and the peace settlement which had followed. In part, the principle of unconditional surrender and the absolute need for Germany’s defeat to be demonstrably total to both the world at large and the German people themselves stemmed from a sense that the German, or Prussian, militarism which had allegedly been a major cause of the earlier conflict had been insufficiently crushed. Now any trace of that dangerous infection had to be thoroughly extirpated, and a high priority for SIS was its role in dismantling the mighty German war machine and ensuring that ‘never again’ would be a fact, rather than just the pious hope it had evidently been between the wars. In 1944 the Bland Report had predicted that ‘close on the heels of victory’ SIS would have ‘to assist in the rooting out of members of the enemy intelligence services and the forcible disbandment of those services themselves’. One of the Service’s ‘prime tasks’ would be to ensure that the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst were ‘effectively broken up and that remnants of the Nazi party do not succeed in maintaining an organisation underground, whether in Germany itself or in some foreign country’. Additionally, ‘by the examination of captured documents and the interrogation of arrested persons, the S.I.S. should be able to acquire a fund of valuable material about the general methods of the enemy secret services’.4

This last objective involved the Service with German former intelligence officers whose thorough debriefing could throw much valuable light on the intelligence successes (and failures) of the war. British interrogators, for example, carefully investigated the German side of the Venlo debacle. With the growing Soviet threat in mind, German counter-intelligence expertise on Communist networks and techniques was much in demand (by United States as well as British agencies), leading the Service to deal with some pretty unattractive former (and not so former) Nazis. One such was Sturmbannführer (Major) Horst Kopkow, a leading German expert on Soviet intelligence, who had been head of Gestapo Amt IV 2A, dealing with war sabotage. Kopkow’s particular wartime target (which he had attacked with some success) had been the Soviet ‘Rote Kapelle’ network, but it was also reported in 1945 that he had an ‘encyclopaedic’ knowledge of the German intelligence service. After he had been arrested by British forces in May 1945, Kopkow cooperated fully with his captors and was interrogated over the next few months, producing a voluminous series of reports, rated as only second in value to the information provided by the Nazi intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg. During 1947 Kopkow was held for some time by the Allied War Crimes Group on suspicion of having mishandled prisoners and of having