Authors: Tim Milne
Kim certainly had some influence on my politics up to the time I was twenty or so, but in the eight and a half years between April 1933, when our Berlin visit ended, and October 1941 I suppose I saw him no more than a couple of dozen times, nearly always in general company. In any case, as I have recounted
above, he became less and less communicative about politics from 1935–36 onwards. I went my own way. My views in the second half of the 1930s were largely conditioned by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish war and the rise of Hitler. Domestic problems interested me less, and I do not think I felt much involvement with the Jarrow marchers and the millions of unemployed. Russia I regarded as a country that could be relied upon for hostility to Hitler. The Nazi–Soviet pact came as a tremendous shock, partly for this reason but even more because it clearly meant that war was inevitable. For the few months of the phony war I floundered in political confusion, and it almost came as a relief when the Germans began attacking in the west; it certainly did so to join the Army in June 1940 and become immersed in a new world. There was little time to think or read about politics, which anyway seemed to have simplified wonderfully. By the time the war ended I had outgrown a great deal of my rather woolly left-wing idealism. I voted Labour for the last time in 1945. As far as I recall, I did not vote in 1950 or 1951 owing to absence abroad, and since then I have voted Conservative.
I have no doubt that Kim’s primary reason for proposing my entry into Section V was that he had a particular and unusual job to offer which, as I hope to show, was right up my street. Politics did not come into it, nor did he ask what my current politics were. No doubt he was glad to have an old friend joining, but it must be remembered that the usual method of recruiting into the Secret Service was by personal recommendation of this kind. He told me later that he had known after four days that he had picked the right man for the job.
It seems quite likely that before long I would have got into one of the clandestine organisations anyway. No fewer than six
of my relatives and connections got jobs during the war in one or more of the ‘funnies’. My wife was in SOE for a time, and later the London office of OSS, the American equivalent of our Secret Service. My brother joined SOE in the Middle East.
†
My sister Angela was in the famous Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley. So was my father’s cousin, Janet Milne – indeed she had joined it before the war. I had a cousin in MI5, and my brother-in-law’s wife was in SOE. Each obtained his or her post independently of me and independently of the others. I myself was approached by a friend in December 1941 and asked if I would like to be considered for an SOE covert propaganda job in Turkey, but by then I was firmly entrenched in Section V.
And it is there we must now return.
Notes
1
. Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and David Leitch,
Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation
, André Deutsch, London, 1968, p. 177.
†
Editor’s note:
The four children of Kenneth and Maud Milne were Marjorie, Angela, Tim and Tony, who was three years younger than Tim. Tony was also a scholar at Westminster School before going up to Christ Church, Oxford. He travelled in Europe as a freelance writer between 1937 and 1939 and during the war worked in the SOE in north Africa and Greece. He joined SIS in 1944 and remained with them for the next twenty-five years.
SECTION V
A
s I walked through the front door of Glenalmond that afternoon, there was little to tell me I was entering a highly secret office. I recall no security guards or showing of passes. Somebody – probably a passing secretary – directed me to a door on the right of the hall, which opened into a large room with unbarred windows on two sides and a view over the garden. Two or three people of about my own age were working there. Kim, they told me, was upstairs with Felix Cowgill. He came in a few minutes later and began to give me a rundown of the section I had joined.
Section V, the counter-espionage department of SIS (as I now learnt to call the Secret Service), was responsible for counter-espionage operations and intelligence outside British territory; within British territory, this field was covered by MI5, otherwise known as the Security Service. Section V not only directed the collection of counter-espionage intelligence by SIS stations abroad, but also collated and appraised all such overseas counter-espionage intelligence whatever the source: it was largely its own customer. It was for us in Glenalmond to build up as complete a picture as possible of enemy intelligence organisations in foreign countries: their staffs, agents, premises, operations,
communications, plans and so on. It was also for us to keep MI5 abreast of this general picture, and more specifically to give them advance information if possible of any hostile espionage operations and plans against British territory, or of the arrival in Britain of an enemy agent, and to carry out enquiries abroad arising from MI5’s work at home. A third potential task for the section, scarcely as yet embarked upon, was to initiate or encourage whatever steps could be taken abroad to stifle enemy espionage organisations and activities on the spot, through diplomatic or other means.
Section V was organised into a number of subsections, some geographical, some functional. The geographical ones included at this time Va, dealing with the Americas; Vb, occupied with western Europe; and Ve, covering eastern Europe and the Middle East. The room I was sitting in was the home of the Iberian subsection, called Vd (the name was liable to be a subject of ribaldry, but after five minutes you got used to it). The ‘symbol’ Vd was also used for Kim himself, head of the subsection: names were not used in communications within SIS. The other officers in Vd had the symbols Vd 1, 2, 3 and so on. I was to be Vd 1; three others had already joined the subsection, and one arrived shortly after. Thus the total officer establishment, including Kim, was six. Until a few weeks earlier it had been no more than one. The suicide of one officer, the nervous breakdown through overwork of another, and complaints from MI5 of inadequate service, had together precipitated the sudden increase. The total officer strength of Section V as a whole at this date was probably only about twenty. In addition there were perhaps twenty to twenty-five secretaries and cardists. The term ‘officer’ did not necessarily mean an officer in the armed forces. Some, including
Kim, were civilians, as were all the girls. Everyone was allowed to wear civilian clothes, and I did so for the next two years or more.
Kim gave me an outline of the job I was now beginning. I was to be the ‘ISOS’ officer in Vd. ISOS was the code-name for German intelligence service wireless messages which the British had been able to intercept and decipher. The deciphering was done by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley, which by October 1941 had broken a number of hand cyphers used locally by German intelligence in Spain, Portugal, Tangier and elsewhere but had not yet cracked the machine cypher used for the main links such as those between Berlin and Madrid, Berlin and Lisbon, and (very importantly) Madrid and Algeciras, overlooking Gibraltar. The number of such intercepts that would appear on my desk each day averaged about twenty, and there was lively expectation that before long the machine cyphers would also be broken, which would bring a vast increase in the work. Meanwhile, Kim showed me samples of what I would be dealing with. The daily batch from Bletchley was cut up by the secretaries into its individual messages, which were then pasted into files according to the terminals: Madrid–Barcelona, Madrid–Bilbao and so on. Madrid to Barcelona would be on the left-hand page, Barcelona to Madrid on the right, and all in date order.
I am not sure how much of this Kim was able to explain to me that evening before we reckoned it was time to go home. Most of the officers and secretaries were billeted in private houses scattered all over St Albans, but one or two married officers rented their own houses. Kim and Aileen had acquired one on the northern outskirts of the town – The Spinney, in Marshalswick Lane – and had invited me to join their household, consisting of
themselves, the infant Josephine and Nannie Tucker. This was to make an enormous difference to life. Later I had an interval of three miserable months in a billet because Aileen was ill, and I was able to appreciate the contrast. For the remainder of my twenty-one months in St Albans I was living at The Spinney, except that for two nights and a day each week I would join Marie in Chelsea.
On that first evening, I was a little apprehensive how it would work out. It was many years since I had seen much of Kim, and I knew he had changed, as I had myself. I reckoned that the sheer interest and pressure of the work would make it easy enough for the two of us to find a
modus vivendi
, but Aileen was an unknown quantity and with a new baby in the house I might well feel in the way. It was a week or two before we all got to know one another, and it might have been longer if there had not been a very minor contretemps. The dining room had been made over to me as my bedroom, but it was also being used, increasingly, as a dump for anything for which no other home could be found. Finally, when I discovered one evening that I could not get into my bed except by climbing over a bicycle, a sewing machine and a pram, I launched into a rather pompous protest. Aileen laughed so much that the situation was immediately deflated, and thereafter we were all on very easy terms. They even moved the bicycle out.
Aileen had little in common with Lizy, except that the attraction of each lay in personality rather than looks, and both liked to laugh. She was slight in build, pale, almost fragile, but with plenty of toughness. In spite or because of coming from a ‘good’ family, she appeared to lack formal education. But she was intelligent, gossipy, human; she loved company, reminiscing,
dropping names in a harmless way. She was the very opposite of either a bluestocking or a dedicated political woman, two possible types that a few years earlier one might have expected Kim to marry. Her spelling was rather capricious: Kim and I would come home to find a partly solved
Times
crossword with a word falling short of its allotted space or spilling over the boundary of the puzzle. Kim maintained that her second name, Armanda, was really Amanda but had been misspelt by Aileen from the start. (I half-believed this until recently I read that her father’s second name had been Armand.) The two of them shared a liking, which they could do little about in wartime St Albans, for good food and drink. The first time Kim had taken her out he had suggested oysters, and between them they had downed several dozen, Aileen matching Kim plateful for plateful; after that the affair never looked back. In those days, before pressures had begun to show, their life together seemed easy and casual. I don’t remember any real quarrel or tiff between them at The Spinney.
In subsection Vd we were all very new. There was no training of any kind: we picked things up as we went along, by asking other people. I am sure that this was by far the best and quickest way of getting the work going. There was little danger of serious mistakes, since everything was discussed and if necessary put up for approval. In any case there was no one available or competent to do the training. In doubt, we turned to Kim. Although he had been in Section V only since August he already seemed to have a mastery of the complicated procedures. While the rest of us were floundering about and wondering what the various ‘symbols’ meant and whether a letter or a minute was the correct way of writing to this or that department or person, Kim never
appeared in difficulties. He knew not only the procedures, but the people as well. One of us, needing to telephone MI5 on some matter which appeared to cut across their various compartments, consulted Kim. ‘Get on to ——,’ he said. ‘He’ll tell you it’s nothing to do with him, but he’ll give you the right answer.’ And so it proved. Kim says in his book that when he first joined SIS in 1940 (of which SOE, or rather its predecessor, was then a part), he thought that ‘somewhere, lurking in deep shadow, there must be another service, really secret and really powerful’. Although he adds that it was his Soviet contact who put this idea in his head, I think that many on joining SIS had something of the same feeling. We even disputed among ourselves what SIS stood for. IS was presumably Intelligence Service, but what of the first S? Most thought it meant Secret, but some said it was Special, and one or two even held that it was like the M in Ethel M. Dell, for ever unknowable. The press have now settled for Secret, but I am still not quite sure (The other popular name, MI6, was not much used among us.)
Within a few days I knew rather more about the German intelligence service – or rather services, for there were two, the
Abwehr
and the
Sicherheitsdienst
or SD – than I did about SIS. The
Abwehr
was in some ways the equivalent of SIS and SOE combined, but differed in being a constituent part of the German High Command. It was divided into three main sections: I, for collecting military, economic, technical and to some extent political intelligence about the Allies; II, for organising sabotage and subversion (the counterpart, though with many differences, of SOE); III, for counter-espionage. The SD, much less important to us at this time than the
Abwehr
, was a Nazi Party organisation. It was largely concerned with broad questions of internal
security in Germany and German-occupied territory, where it functioned alongside the Gestapo, but it also had an important overseas function, particularly in political intelligence.