• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2918 0

and motivation varied considerably. Only a handful worked on beyond the end of 1946. One of the most productive, ‘Tudor’, lasted in Berlin until 1949 and did, indeed, produce valuable political intelligence for much of his active life but became an ‘administrative headache’. A very promising agent, ‘Upton’, a prewar Jewish refugee and Pioneer Corps volunteer, well educated and well connected, produced valuably for a few months but then opted to return to the United Kingdom for demobilisation. Another P.6 agent, ‘Merrick’, who had been dropped in by parachute near Hamburg in December 1944 and was overrun in April 1945, remained out of touch until 1946, when he contacted the Berlin station and was then run from Berlin into the Soviet Zone. In 1947 he bodily carried a Soviet 85mm armour-piercing shell over to West Berlin, and topped this in 1948 with a Soviet aircraft propeller. He was trained as a stay-behind agent, but was later sacked for ‘incurable inefficiency’. A relic branch of SOE, ME 42, which had moved into Germany with the 21st Army Group, was also busy in 1945 infiltrating recruited German prisoners-of-war (known to SOE as ‘Bonzos’) into prisoner-of-war camps in order to try to identify unregenerate Nazis who might be planning to form a resistance movement. This unit, which SOE had intended to be the spearhead of future SOE operations in Germany, was entirely taken over by SIS at the end of 1945.13

Over the winter of 1945-6, the SIS representation in Germany was transformed into an element of the Intelligence Division (Int. Div.) of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element), of which it ostensibly formed the Technical Section, located in Bad Salzuflen, north-east of Bielefeld. No initial directive has survived for the new station, but, considering the overwhelming preoccupation of the Control Commission with ensuring that there could be no resurgence of German militarism or Nazism while the establishment of democratic government got under way, it is likely that SIS’s primary initial intelligence role was to penetrate and report on the German economic and political scene, with particular reference to the persistence of Nazism and the role of the German Communist Party. In mid-June 1946 the chief of the United States Strategic Services Unit (successor to the OSS), Crosby Lewis, reported that ‘while there was complete agreement that the principal target for intelligence operations for both British Services and the Americans was the Soviet Union’, the British were ‘placing a higher priority on activities inside Germany’ than the Americans, and appeared ‘to be concerned with building up within the British Zone and elsewhere in Germany a long range under cover series of contacts and agents which will serve their interests after the Allied occupation of Germany is over’.14 Any possible future threat from the Communist East was at first perhaps a secondary concern. On the counter-intelligence side, however, retrospective reporting on the German intelligence service soon gave way to the need to cover Russian intelligence activities in the British Zone.

In November 1946 Simon Gallienne was appointed head of station at Bad Salzuflen and senior SIS officer in Germany. Ostensibly he was head of No. 1 Planning and Evaluation Unit within the Intelligence Division, into which the two Civil Control Units were subsumed. This was one of a series of anodyne cover names which SIS adopted for its German units. Also at Bad Salzuflen was No. 4 Economic Assessment Unit; at Hamburg No. 5 Regional Rehabilitation Section; and at Düsseldorf the Rhineland Statistics Recording Unit. A perhaps apocryphal story relates that when an SIS secretary was asked by a male acquaintance what they did in No. 1 Planning and Evaluation Unit, she replied that ‘in the morning we plan and in the afternoon we evaluate what we planned in the morning’. By November 1947 Gallienne had thirty-eight officers and fifty-three administrative staff under his command. He was ‘responsible to C’ for all secret intelligence and special operations activities based