From Information to Intrigue

Studies in Secret Service Based on the Swedish Experience, 1939-1945

C.G. McKay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780714634708
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000144086
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume offers an account of some key activities of the Allied secret services and their German counterparts in Sweden during World War II. It also describes in some detail Swedish wartime legislation and Swedish organizations concerned with internal security and intelligence.

1

Gamekeeper’s perspective

FIRST PRINCIPLES

Some states try to maintain their national security through military alliance; other states reckon that this aim is best served by avoiding such ties altogether, hoping in time of war, as neutrals, not only to ensure that their territory remains outside the field of conflict but also to preserve as far as possible their accustomed commercial and diplomatic ties with the belligerents, irrespective of side.

Neutral status presupposes both rights and obligations. However, the actual policies and behaviour of a neutral are in practice shaped by a host of factors relevant to the complex calculus of statecraft: its geographical position; the strategy and war aims of the belligerents; the neutral country’s relative military and economic strength; its state of military preparedness; the morale and attitudes of its people; its economicties; the strength of its ideological preferences; its historical links of language, culture, kinship and sentiment; and last but not least the expectation of its policy makers as regards the military outcome of the conflict. It is a calculus in which perceptions, as well as the facts they relate to, have to be taken into account.

At the beginning of the Second World War, there were no fewer than twenty neutral European states. By the end of 1944, only six remained: Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain, Portugal and the Irish Republic. How the neutral countries proposed to steer their course was one thing; but for the belligerent states themselves, absorbed by the calculations of war, the neutral countries were viewed in accordance with their own pragmatic ends. In varying degrees, the neutral states functioned as potential sources of supplies. In addition, they constituted useful listening posts and were to serve, in different ways, as support points for mounting a range of more or less clandestine activities: the collection of information by unauthorised means; the provision of courier facilities for underground movements and intelligence services; counter-espionage; economic warfare; the distribution of black propaganda; the spreading of rumour; exercises in deception; the extension and reception of peace feelers. This overspill of war in the form of clandestine activity in neutral countries – the chief concern of the present monograph – was nothing new. The First World War when in the north Sweden, Norway and Denmark all remained neutral, provided several illustrations of some of its characteristic features:

The former British Minister at Stockholm, Sir Esme Howard, recounts in his memoirs how Mr. Owen Philpots was sent from Britain to take charge of the special investigative work involved in blacklisting those individuals and companies in Sweden suspected of forwarding prohibited goods to Germany, after the consuls had shown a reluctance to become engaged in this work.¹

On 9 October 1918, a former corporal in the Swedish armed forces was arrested and later charged with supplying, during 1917 and 1918, hundreds of reports regarding individuals and individual firms trading with the Central Powers and regarding the cargoes, arrivals and departures of vessels calling at Swedish ports, to the French Naval Attaché, Talpomba and the American Assistant Military Attaché, Thorling. The corporal was also charged with having engaged in military espionage against Germany.²

In 1917, the Germans established an information post in Gothenburg under the command of Captain Lassen, who had previously served at Antwerp. Its function was to collect intelligence about Entente vessels and trade as well as information about the position of minefields etc. When one of the members of the organisation was compromised and expelled, it continued to operate under commercial cover as the trading company ’Emptio’.³

In 1917, the French Naval Attaché, Talpomba, enlisted the help of certain youths, induding a very junior member of the Swedish Telegraph Service, to provide him in due course with several hundred copies of official German, Austrian and Turkish telegrams passing between the legations of these countries in Stockholm and their respective foreign offices.⁴

The first German spy arrested in Britain was Karl Lody. Lody was in correspondence with a merchant Adolf Burchard, Stockholm. Inside one of Lody’ s letters was another envelope addressed to J. Stammer, Berlin.⁵

A member of the editorial staff of Göteborgs Aftonblad was given the task of recruiting people in Sweden to travel to England on espionage missions.⁶

In a Swedish memorandum of 31 October 1918 relating to a visa application by the Greek citizen, Lykiardopoulos, it was said that there were grounds for considering him the leader of a comprehensive military espionage organisation in Stockholm. At the beginning of the war, he had lived in Sweden under a false name. In May of 1916, the police had been instructed to keep him under surveillance after his return from a visit to Germany. Bruce Lockhart mentions in Memoirs of a British Agent that at the end of 1915 Lykiardopoulos, who was secretary of the Moscow Arts Theatre, ’had undertaken a hazardous mission on our behalf into Germany’, travelling as a Greek tobacco merchant.⁷

In an attempt to repair the damage done to its system of overseas communications by the Telconia’s successful slicing of German underwater telegraph cables and to circumvent enemy monitoring activities, Auswärtiges Amt persuaded the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs to allow it to make use of Swedish cables and the Swedish diplomatic pouch for its traffic between Berlin and Washington. In 1915, the British lodged a protest in Stockholm which led to a discontinuation of some of this traffic. However German traffic continued to use the Swedish communication channels to North America by means of a detour via South America.⁸

Fully conscious of the difficulties of waging a war on two fronts, Imperial Germany strove to split the alliance of their opponents. This could be accomplished in two basic ways. One was to appeal to influential groups in the enemy camp to work towards the conclusion of a separate peace. Several discreet attempts to probe possible Russian interest in such a peace, were made through Stockholm.⁹

When the various attempts to promote separate peace negotiations failed, Germany increasingly relied on the second method of weakening the enemy alliance, namely by fomenting disorder in the empires of its adversaries through the support of diverse movements for national independence or for socialist revolution (Revolutionierungspolitik). The neutral countries became havens for the representatives of such movements. Often sustained by German funds if not always responsive to German wishes, the representatives were able to organise conferences and issue propaganda likely to embarrass the common enemy. At the same time, links were maintained with secret sympathisers at home. Stockholm provided an important base for various groups working against Imperial Russia: Finns, Baits, Bolsheviks and others.¹⁰

In 1917, a certain Baron von Rautenfels, a courier in the service of the Kaiser, was detained by the police in Kristiania and his official baggage was opened to disclose a large amount of sabotage equipment, some part of which was believed to be intended for German-sponsored operations within Russia.¹¹

The involvement of neutral countries in clandestine activities is not fortuitous: rather it is a consequence of the logic of neutrality and the totalisation of war.

First and most important, the neutral state enjoys the right of being able to maintain diplomatic and commercial relations with both belligerents. Neutral diplomats are able to report from the belligerent countries; merchant ships and commercial aircraft may travel between neutral countries and the belligerents. This fact immediately gives rise to the possibility of various types of flow whether they are flows from one belligerent B1 to the other belligerent B2 via the neutral N (transit flows) or simply flows which originate in N and end up in a belligerent B or vice-versa (non-transit flows). There are also transit flows which go from an area or country occupied by a belligerent B via N to another area or country occupied by B. In the case of transit flows, N functions as a channel or connecting corridor: in the case of non-transit flows between Nanda belligerent B, N may in practical terms function as an annex to B. Transit flows involving a neutral N are in an obvious sense roundabout or indirect. It is this latter feature which often makes them of particular interest to a belligerent seeking a cloak for some activity since a well-established technique in all clandestine activity is precisely the use of indirect links.

The foregoing notion of flow is abstract and therefore usefully wide. There are flows of goods and services, of money, of men and of information. The flow of goods may be made up of a single piece of complex technical equipment, a crashed rocket, or tons of metallic ore. The flow of men may consist of trainloads of troops on leave or single civilian couriers. The individuals involved in the flow may be nationals belonging to one of the belligerent states or to a state occupied by a belligerent or they may be citizens of a neutral state. They may be senior diplomats, legation chauffeurs, international bankers or merchant seamen. The flow of money covers sackloads of dollars, gold, works of art and bank credits. The flow of information embraces the flow of military intelligence as well as newspapers, books, films, academic theses and radio transmissions. Rumour, propaganda and deception material also constitute flows of information, albeit of a special kind.

International law, which merely codifies certain agreements slowly arrived at by the representatives of sovereign states conferring together, already places certain restrictions on flows between neutral and belligerent states. Thus Article 2 of the Hague Convention (V) respecting the rights and duties of neutral powers and persons in case of war on land (1907) specifies that:

Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.¹²

Article 5 ordains (by implication) that a neutral Power must not allow such a flow to take place. Prize law and the contraband list stipulate which items may or may not be carried on a neutral ship to a belligerent. Further restrictions may apply by reason of some particular treaty or agreement reached between the neutral state and a belligerent. Thus the 1939 War Trade Agreement between Sweden and Great Britain placed a ceiling on the amount of iron ore which could be annually supplied to Germany by Sweden. Lastly there are the specific restrictions introduced by a belligerent to control flows within its own territory. Thus in the case of the flow of men, while a company in a neutral country may be allowed to send a commercial representative to a branch factory in a belligerent state, the security service of the belligerent state may refuse to sanction the right to enter of certain individuals or, having conceded it, may place restrictions on their movements within the country, certain regions being placed out of bounds.

Although laws, treaties and agreements have a normative role and provide to some extent standards which may be appealed to in a controversy, it is a commonplace of history that they are not always honoured to the full. Such regulatory codes cannot cover every contingency; the rapid dynamic of events may make them less relevant; ambiguities in their formulation may be exploited in unforeseen ways. An agreement may be reached between states but states are made up of individuals and individual companies and these do not always observe the niceties of government regulations. War places great pressures on both belligerents and neutrals and at the end of the day international law and indeed any prior paper commitment will tend to give way to what is conceived as a vital national interest or more generally as a vital interest of the alliance to which the nation is party. For this reason, irrespective of any formal agreements which may have been signed, a belligerent B cannot afford to ignore flows involving a neutral N. In practical terms, N may constitute a chink in its armour; alternatively it may constitute a chink in the enemy’s armour, to be exploited to best advantage.

A second reason for the involvement of neutral territory in clandestine activities, is to be found in the principle of comparative advantage. A neutral country is often not to the same degree subject to the whole range of internal restrictions imposed by a belligerent. Even if certain practices are expressly forbidden by law, the penalty for defying the law may be significantly less than that which would be exacted in the territory of a belligerent. Espionage is a case in point, being often a capital offence in a state at war but a non-capital offence in a neutral country, if it is directed against a power other than the neutral country itself.

Lastly, a neutral state often forms a place of asylum for diverse refugees from territory controlled by the belligerent powers. They form a pool of knowledge regarding their homelands and countrymen and from their ranks can sometimes be recruited useful and willing fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Gamekeeper’s perspective
• 2 Poacher’s perspective – 1
• 3 Poacher’s perspective – 2
• Appendix 1: A cryptological note
• Appendix 2: The security of diplomatic missions
• Appendix 3: A mysterious link
• Appendix 4: A note on Soviet and Comintern activities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Personal Names