Section D for Destruction

Forerunner of SOE: The Story of Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service

Malcolm Atkin

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473892620
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Inteligencia y espionaje

When Neville Chamberlain made his famous Peace in Our Time statement in 1938, after the Munich Agreement with Hitler, he may, or may not, have been aware that the new Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service was already making plans to mount an all-out political and sabotage war against Nazi Germany. This was a new form of warfare, encompassing bribery, black propaganda and sabotage by agents described as having no morals or scruples. To the horror of many, it disregarded the conventions of neutrality and was prepared to hit the Nazi state wherever it could do most damage. Malcolm Atkin reveals how Section D's struggle to build a European wide anti-Nazi resistance movement was met with widespread suspicion from government, to the extent of a systematic destruction of its reputation. It was, however, a key pioneer of irregular warfare that led to the formation of the famous Special Operations Executive (SOE). His study is the first in-depth account of it to be published since the release of previously secret documents to the National Archives.

Chapter 1

Creating the ‘Fourth Arm’ – 1938

Everything you do is going to be disliked by a lot of people in Whitehall – some in this building. The more you succeed, the more they will dislike you and what you are trying to do.

(Admiral Hugh Sinclair, Chief of the SIS, 1 April 1938)1

The British government had considered the possibility of a war with Germany as soon as Hitler took power in 1933, with a chillingly accurate estimate that Germany would be ready to take the offensive in 1938 or 1939.2 The task of gathering intelligence on the rise of the Nazi war machine was that of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, aka MI6). But SIS was starved of resources during the inter-war period and, as the estimate for the outbreak of war drew closer, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, Chief of SIS (CSS), tried to put the organisation onto a better war footing. The intelligence operations of SIS would remain pre-eminent but Sinclair also wanted SIS to take a more aggressive role, arguing in 1935 that Britain needed the capability to retaliate against any threat of sabotage.3 In 1937 Claude Dansey, head of the Z network, suggested to Sinclair that SIS should recruit sabotage agents who would be kept distinct from SIS intelligencegathering networks. They would be ‘agents we have employed from time to time [who] were more fitted for this kind of action than they were for obtaining information’. In January 1938 Section III (Naval) and Section VI (Industrial) endorsed the concept, but to Dansey’s dismay Sinclair went further and in April 1938 he created Section D with a broader remit to include propaganda and political warfare.4 Its agents would become the ‘Fourth Arm’ of warfare, a clandestine civilian force supplementing the three regular services. The task was fundamentally at odds with the primary role of SIS in quietly collecting and assessing intelligence; it also carried huge risks of precipitating diplomatic incidents. Bickham Sweet-Escott, an officer in Section D and later SOE, put it thus:

The man who is interested in obtaining intelligence must have peace and quiet, and the agents he employs must never, if possible, be found out. But the man who has to carry out operations will produce loud noises if he is successful, and it is only too likely that some of the men he uses will not escape.5

Section D was conceived as a weapon of offence. The concept of organising subversion and sabotage before any declaration of war caused distaste within both SIS and the Foreign Office, especially as targets included neutral countries having trading interests with the anticipated enemy. The tendency was for those few officials and politicians who were aware of its activities to look the other way, producing a lack of engagement that was later to have serious consequences. As the 1940 Hankey Inquiry into SIS commented:

At first sight the natural instinct of any humane person is to recoil from this undesirable business [sabotage] as something he would rather know nothing about.6

In early March 1938, just before the Anschluss, 40-year-old Major Laurence Grand, then Deputy Assistant Director of Mechanisation at the War Office, was asked if he would be interested in a secondment to SIS to advise on sabotage.7 Later that day, he was collected by Stewart Menzies (then head of SIS Section II (Military) and Sinclair’s deputy) and taken to meet Admiral Sinclair at his house at Queen Anne’s Gate (connected to the rear of SIS HQ at Broadway Buildings). A professional soldier in the Royal Engineers, Grand had served during the First World War in France and North Russia, and subsequently in Kurdistan, where his work with the irregular Iraq levies earned him an MBE. After a series of staff appointments and work with Imperial Chemical War Research, in 1938 he was coming to the end of a four-year posting at the War Office. He was looking forward to being posted to Egypt in command of an engineering unit and was assured by his commanding officer that his attachment to SIS would be short and would not affect the Middle East posting.8 Speaking after the war, Colonel Leslie Wood of Aston House mistakenly believed that Grand came to the attention of SIS through an incident on India’s North-West Frontier, where he ‘doctored’ ammunition that he knew would be stolen by the Pathans and would lead to the rifles blowing up in the thieves’ faces, which was regarded as ungentlemanly behaviour by his fellow officers. However, Grand did not serve in India until later in his service and this story might instead refer to events in Kurdistan, thereby forming the inspiration for Section D booby trap experiments whereby detonators were inserted into .303 rounds with explosive results! More prosaically, Grand had written a paper on irregular warfare whilst at the War Office in 1937, which brought him to the attention of Stewart Menzies, who suggested him for the new post.9 Although not a career intelligence officer, he did have a reputation for being inventive and a skilled engineer with a knowledge of demolition. The immediate enthusiasm of Grand for the task proved disconcerting.

Grand was tall, handsome and armed with a sharp wit (Pl. 1). He abandoned his army uniform whilst with SIS and was always elegantly dressed with a red carnation in his lapel, and chain-smoking cigarettes from a long, black, cigarette holder. He was a free thinker, not something that sat easily within the corridors of power in either the War Office or SIS HQ, and he was not gifted with tact. Kim Philby, one-time Section D officer, described him thus: ‘his mind was certainly not clipped. It ranged free and handsome over the whole field of his awesome responsibilities, never shrinking from an idea, however big or wild’.10 Such men inspire and infuriate in equal measure. To the Director of Military Intelligence, General Pownall, Grand was ‘gifted, enthusiastic and persuasive, but I do not regard him as being well-balanced or reliable’.11 Ever optimistic, for Joan Bright Astley he was a ‘volatile dreamer’:

His imagination flaring ahead of our schemes, each one of which seemed to him a war-stopper. If, as so often happened, one of his schemes or ours [MIR] came to nothing, he showed no disappointment, called for more and never let his enthusiasm descend to the level of a cautious ‘Wait and see’.12

Grand attracted fierce loyalty from his staff but a deep suspicion from others. For Eric Maschwitz he was a remarkable man: ‘Like the rest of the staff I adored him to the point of hero-worship.’13 Grand was loyal in return, necessarily giving staff considerable discretion in a flat organisational structure that otherwise placed a huge personal responsibility on Grand. His principle of defending his staff ‘through thick and thin whatever mistakes you might make’ could, however, be dangerous, as events in Sweden were to show.14 Grand’s theatrical nature found the air of secrecy surrounding SIS appealing and his officers were not supposed to acknowledge each other if they met in the street. His friend and colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Jo Holland of MI(R), was amused by such behaviour and sometimes used to shout ‘Boo’ to members when he passed them in the street. The mischievous John Walter, former Times journalist and now Section D officer, once got into trouble for lack of respect when he did not acknowledge Sinclair when he paid a visit to the office. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Walter, ‘but I thought we were not supposed to know who he was.’15

Colin Gubbins, the future head of SOE but then sharing offices with Section D as part of the War Office MI(R) (see p. 22), was aghast at what he saw as the amateurishness and extravagance of some of the wilder projects of Section D, but at the same time he found the risk-taking attitude of the young ex-businessmen refreshing in contrast to the ponderous hierarchy of the War Office.16 In the immediate frustration of his wartime politicking, Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office (first CEO of SOE) complained that Grand’s judgement ‘is almost always wrong, his knowledge wide but alarmingly superficial, his organisation in many respects a laughing stock, and he is a consistent and fluent liar’.17 This came after Grand and Stewart Menzies together concocted a series of paper-thin lies for the Foreign Office, to try to provide plausible deniability for the Oxelösund sabotage scheme (see Chapter 9). Jebb’s attitude later mellowed and whilst still describing Grand as ‘rather theatrical and James Bondish’, he now admitted that Grand was ‘impressive’ and ‘an able man who inspired loyalty’.18 Grand’s citation for the award of CBE in 1943, when he was Chief Engineer for 4 Corps in India, not only offered what was a universal acknowledgement of his drive and imagination but also significantly complimented his organisational skills – proof of the political nature of earlier criticism. It stated:

Owing to lack of resources, much improvisation has been necessary. His drive and energy has reflected itself in those working under him. … He has shown great ability as an organiser under difficult conditions and a determination to attain his object. His work merits recognition.19

Grand’s successful career as an engineering officer, retiring as Director of Fortifications and Works with the rank of major general, certainly demonstrates that he was not the uncontrollable maverick that might be inferred from some of his detractors.

At his interview in early March, Sinclair told Grand that he wanted someone to ‘look after sabotage’. Grand’s first question was ‘Is anything banned?’, to which came the blunt reply: ‘Nothing at all.’ He began work on 1 April and, prophetically, Sinclair warned the task would not be popular: ‘Don’t have any illusions. Everything you do is going to be disliked by a lot of people in Whitehall – some in this building. The more you succeed, the more they will dislike you and what you are trying to do.’ In what became a mantra for Grand, Sinclair added ‘There are a lot of jealous people about so don’t tell anyone more than you have to.’20 Jebb wrote after the war: ‘The great criticism of the old D Organisation had been that nobody knew what it was up to and that none of those departments which should have been consulted was consulted.’21 As will be shown, such criticism (of a policy encouraged by Sinclair) was often unfair. Having been given an office on the ground floor of SIS HQ in Broadway Buildings (Pl. 9), with a desk and chair but little else, he admitted ‘we were starting from scratch with a vengeance’.22 Grand was originally appointed for just two months and had no staff. His initial task was to write a feasibility study of a new type of warfare and he admitted the concept was ‘peculiarly disreputable’.23 Grand’s report of 31 May 1938 was a comprehensive plan for encouraging internal revolt against the Nazis. The potential targets, which were both broad and shocking to those who still clung to a gentlemanly vision of war, encompassed not only sabotage of electricity supplies, telephones, railways, dockyards and airfields, but also considered starting forest and crop fires, poisoning food supplies and the introduction of disease into animals and crops. This focus on economic warfare, rather than purely military targets, was a core element of British strategic planning during the first two years of war, deriving from the widespread belief that in the First World War it was the economic blockade that finally broke Germany, rather than the fighting on the Western Front. Resources to develop such work were slender and it was envisaged that existing foreign anti-Nazi groups would be the main mechanism of delivery.

Grand’s report was approved and in June 1938 he became Head of the new Section D, aka Section IX, aka the ‘Sabotage Service’, aka the ‘Statistical Research Department of the War Office’, reporting directly to the Chief of SIS. Its offices were originally in the shabby basement of SIS HQ at 54 Broadway Buildings which, despite its pre-war cover of the ‘Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company’, was an address known to London taxi drivers and German agents alike as the home of Britain’s secret intelligence service (Pl. 9). In April 1939 Section D moved around the corner from Broadway to the 6th floor of a Victorian mansion block at 2 Caxton Street, connected by a passage to the St Ermin’s Hotel where Grand later maintained an apartment funded by Section D (Pl. 10). Eric Maschwitz described the early premises in Caxton Street as a cramped little office where the security was somewhat weakened by the staff cars and uniformed dispatch riders that were constantly parked outside it. The original charter of Section D stated it was ‘to investigate every possibility of attacking potential enemies by means other than the operation of military forces’.24 Its twin aims were to:

1. undertake sabotage and create anti-German political unrest in neutral and occupied countries, and

2. provide lines of communication from neutral countries into enemy countries for introduction of propaganda (produced by Section D or from other departments).

Such aims not only challenged the accepted concepts of neutrality and diplomatic process but also raised concern in official circles regarding the moral consequences of guerrilla warfare fought by civilians with no visible chain of command, which was illegal under The Hague Convention and was a form ...