Authors: Tim Milne
I still have nightmares thinking of the risks we took in carting all those top secret papers through buses and pubs. I don’t think there were specific rules against it, but the penalties for losing the stuff would hardly bear contemplating. Sometimes I would have ten or more ISOS files, among other papers, while Kim’s batch might well include a thick wad of BJs,
4
the equally sensitive diplomatic intercepts; it was a time to catch up on reading. I sometimes wondered why he bothered so much about BJs, which with well-defined exceptions were only occasionally of interest in our peculiar world, but if I thought of it further I must have concluded that someone needed to comb through them and he was the best person. I suppose now that he may have been concerned also to note BJs of interest to the Russians, perhaps even to abstract or ‘borrow’ the useful ones – there was precious little security control over papers of this kind, of which several copies were circulating.
Soon after we arrived back we would be sitting down in the kitchen to a meal prepared by Aileen. In the early days we had the occasional services of someone we called ‘the poacher’, though I dare say his offerings were legitimately come by; but
his pheasants soon became chickens, then rabbits, then nothing. We still ate fairly well, on our purely civilian rations. Aileen was a reasonably good cook and even her Woolton pie was edible.
†
Neither we nor anyone else in Section V did much entertaining. Nor did we seek outside distractions. In twenty-one months Kim, Aileen and I went to one old Marx Brothers film. At The Spinney we had a radio and a rather primitive gramophone with twenty or thirty records. But here was a potential source of discord. Aileen, who was tone deaf, hated most music, and Kim was thereby deprived of something he had always needed. Later he must have asserted himself, especially in Washington where he bought many LPs. But in St Albans we had almost no good music.
It was a casual domestic life, but at the same time a very regular one: off to work each morning at the same time, back between seven and eight. Kim went up to London once or twice a week but would be home by evening. But after I had been four or five months at The Spinney life changed abruptly. I came back from a day off to be told by Kim that Aileen was ill, a nurse was being brought in and my room was needed. Within a day or so I was billeted on a household of elderly people whose lives had been little affected by the war. Although their financial reward from my presence was small, they benefited from my ration book. All I ate there was a light breakfast: in the evenings I would get a bite at a pub, then go back to the office. It would have been a miserable interlude indeed if the work had not been so exciting. After three months Aileen was deemed to have recovered. The
nurse left, and I returned, thankfully, to the prams and sewing machines and deckchairs of my room at The Spinney.
Kim describes in his book the farcical affair of the ‘ORKI companions’, which was near completion when I arrived in Section V in October 1941. I had no part in it. I summarise it here because with hindsight one can see a significance which nobody (other than Kim) could have appreciated at the time, and of which Kim says nothing in his book. He tells us that ISOS revealed, in September 1941, that the
Abwehr
in Spain was sending two agents named Hirsch and Gilinski, the first accompanied by his wife and mother-in-law, to South America. Shortly before their departure from Bilbao by ship, the
Abwehr
station there sent a cypher message to the
Abwehr
in Madrid to say that (in the English translation issued by Bletchley) Hirsch and his ‘ORKI companions’ were ready to leave. Kim appears to have leapt to the conclusion that ‘ORKI’ might be an abbreviation for a group of revolutionary (anti-Stalinist) communists, probably Trotskyists, who were presumably being sponsored and exploited by the
Abwehr
. (He does not mention this, but according to what he told me later, he – or some assistant – unearthed a reference to an organisation of this kind called RKI, and I understood from him that it might also have been called ORKI in the same way that the GPU was also called OGPU.) Kim, breaking several rules, managed to arrange that, in addition to Hirsch and Gilinski, at least a dozen people on the passenger list whose names suggested a possible link with dissident communism, or perhaps were merely Slavonic, should be arrested and interrogated in Trinidad. They were detained − most I think for quite a long time.
When some months later I found myself looking back at this incident I was completely flummoxed. It was totally unlike anything else the
Abwehr
was doing, and the evidence ludicrously insufficient for the kind of action that was taken. I had also noticed that when GC&CS came across a short indecipherable passage in ISOS they were liable (in the text as issued) to show the relevant ‘corrupt’ letters in capitals, in the middle of an otherwise intelligible message. I had noticed further that, in the type of cypher used by the
Abwehr
substations in Spain, a ‘corrupt’ passage often consisted of correct letters alternating with ‘corrupt’ ones. I asked GC&CS whether ‘ORKI’ could be ‘DREI’, i.e. ‘three’. They checked, and agreed at once. In other words, the message simply referred to Hirsch and his three companions (wife, mother-in-law and Gilinski).
It seems very likely that, because of the imagined Trotskyist connection, Kim saw a great opportunity to score a success with the Russians. He would certainly have wished to discuss it with them. They would have been extremely interested if the Germans really were helping dissident communist groups in this way, and they may have pressed Kim to take the action he did. In the state of ignorance prevailing in Section V at the time, this would have scarcely have aroused suspicion. I wonder if it was the Russians who put him onto the possible interpretation of RKI/ORKI, or whether it emerged from a study by Kim and others of ancient Central Registry files – or perhaps both. Even if Kim did not have the opportunity to consult the Russians, he must have seen a chance of presenting them with a coup. Subsequently – as in his book – he made a joke of it, and even claimed it as a triumph of sorts, although in fact it was an utter fiasco. He seems to have acted miles out of character and indeed
common sense. My conclusion is that he could not conceivably have behaved in this way if he had not been pursuing something of value, as he saw it, to the NKVD. I am happy to say that we never treated ISOS so recklessly and crassly again.
Notes
1
. A British physicist and scientific military intelligence expert attached to SIS during the war. In 1946, Jones was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, which he held until his retirement in 1981. He did not want to stay in intelligence under the proposed post-war reorganisation.
2
. Known as Operation Biting. One of the most daring raids of the war, it was carried out in February 1942 by units of the newly formed British 1st Airborne Division, who seized the German radar station at Bruneval in northern France, and brought back to England vital components of the German ‘Würzburg’ radar installation.
3
. See Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville,
Philby: The Long Road to Moscow
, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973.
4
. BJ stood for ‘Blue Jacket’, denoting the colour of the files in which they were circulated. They were the product of material produced by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), later GCHQ.
†
Editor’s note:
In the names ISOS and ISK, the IS stood for ‘Illicit Signals’. OS stood for Oliver Strachey, brother of Lytton Strachey, and K for Alfred Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox, brother of Ronald and E. V. Knox. Strachey and Knox were two of the Bletchley immortals.
†
Editor’s note:
The ‘present prices’ are from the late 1970s. In 2014 Milne’s wartime prices equate to around £150 and £180 respectively.
†
Editor’s note:
Woolton pie was a wartime vegetable pie recommended by the Ministry of Food and named after the Food Minister, Lord Woolton.
6
ON THE MAP
B
y the summer of 1942 Section V was beginning to take on a different look. The number of officers and secretaries was steadily increasing. The flow of ISOS was now five or ten times what it had been a year earlier. Abroad too we were expanding. In the early part of the war SIS overseas stations had been all-purpose, trying to produce intelligence of all kinds, military, political, technical and counter-espionage. But counter-espionage had had very low priority. In 1940–41 Felix Cowgill succeeded in arranging for specialist counter-espionage officers to be posted to the Madrid and Lisbon stations. Although nominally subordinate at this time to the existing head of station, they became in practice (and later officially) independent, with their own offices, staff and cyphers. Now other officers from Section V were being sent abroad to open their own stations. We were beginning to become almost a separate service from the rest of SIS, though under the same general management in London and having very close links both at home and in the field.
There is no doubt that Cowgill was the man chiefly responsible for putting Section V on the map. History so far has given him a raw deal. He was caricatured in the original
Sunday Times
articles, and not very fairly treated in Kim’s book. Not that I am
in a position to throw stones at the authors of either: my views of Felix became very critical as the war progressed, and in the end I was, I suppose, a beneficiary of his downfall. Certainly he had large faults, two in particular. One, much commented on in the Philby literature, was that he made an altogether inordinate number of enemies. Anyone who tried to build up a large department from almost nothing in the cut-throat world of wartime intelligence was bound to make enemies, but Felix seemed to go far out of his way to antagonise people. A more serious fault in my view was that his judgement on intelligence matters was not always sound, and he did not fully appreciate the changing pattern of the work. It would indeed have needed one of R. V. Jones’s ideal intelligence officers with an outsize brain to keep up with all that was coming in, but Felix’s operational judgements and ideas became increasingly remote from reality. His considerable gifts lay in a different direction. A section chief without his drive, stubbornness, courage, capacity for hard work and interest in administration would not have succeeded in preserving and increasing Section V’s role and getting the necessary staff in the crucial years of 1941 and 1942. Kim, with all his great abilities, could not have done the same job.
It is interesting to speculate on the kind of animal Section V might have become if Kim had been in charge in those years. Probably it would have been much smaller and more closely knit with MI5, perhaps in a joint working organisation; it would have had good staff and would have done an efficient job; but in the end it would not have made such a mark. Kim congratulates himself in his book on having helped to abolish Section V after the war. But there would not have been so much to abolish if it had not been for Felix Cowgill.
In two of his projects Felix showed himself more far sighted than Kim or me or most other people in Section V. These were, first, liaison with OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the American counterpart of SIS) and, second, the establishment of Special Counter-Intelligence (SCI) units in a number of military headquarters in the field. Though both belong more fully to a later period of the war, their beginnings were in 1942. Contact between SIS and OSS had begun even before OSS was properly established and collaboration was of course inevitable after Pearl Harbor. But Felix conceived something far more radical – no less than a joint counter-espionage headquarters consisting of Section V and the corresponding section of OSS, later called X2 – the very name was derived from XB, the code-name used for Section V in our communications with the field. During 1942 the first X2 officers appeared in St Albans, and huts to accommodate them and the later arrivals were built in the grounds of Glenalmond. Most papers could be freely passed between Section V and X2, which also received ISOS although action remained with Section V.
The objections from me, Kim and others were twofold. First, the risk to ISOS, and to SIS organisation and operations generally, would be enlarged. Second, we foresaw that for a long time we would get little or nothing from the arrangement, and would have to spend a lot of our precious time talking to and training the X2 officers. So we did, but in the end it paid off because from November 1942 onwards much of the German-occupied territory liberated by the Allies fell in the first instance to the Americans. Information from captured
Abwehr
and SD officers and agents, and the opportunity to ‘turn’ suitable agents against the Germans, were immediately available to us. The process was
greatly helped by the establishment of British and American military SCI units, staffed by officers trained in Section V and attached to Army Group headquarters or sometimes a lower formation. The SCI units were equipped with rapid and secure wireless and cypher communications with Section V, and in effect were Section V (or X2) outstations in the battle areas. X2 officers could be attached to Section V’s SCI units and vice versa.