The Small Scale Raiding Force was also known as 62 Commando and was sometimes referred to by SOE as Station 62. It was one of a considerable number of small units formed by all three of our Armed Services early in the war to carry out specialized and often very risky tasks. Some of the better known of these units were David Stirling’s SAS, Popski’s Private Army, No. 10. Inter-Allied Commando, the Royal Marine Special Boat Squadron and units of frogmen such as the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties.
As early as December, 1940, an informal agreement had been reached between SOE and Combined Operations Headquarters that SOE would handle small-scale raids on enemy territory by units of up to thirty men, ideally foreigners, so that if stranded during an operation they could melt into the countryside of their native countries and stand a better chance of escape. But the control of such operations did not for long remain exclusively with SOE and most were taken over by one or other of the Armed Services. However, SOE did retain control over the Small Scale Raiding Force until it was disbanded in April, 1943.
The SSRF was originally conceived in the winter of 1940, the brainchild of a member of SOE, Captain Gus March-Phillipps. In March, 1941, together with a young engineering graduate who had served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps, Geoffrey Appleyard, (the officer who rescued Captain Berge), he requisitioned a Brixham trawler, the Maid Honor, that had already been converted into a yacht, and had it refitted to look like a trawler but with a dummy superstructure to house hidden guns and other fittings to make it suitable for raiding purposes. It was afterwards based at Poole but the Admiralty made difficulties that prevented it from being used in home waters in the Channel.
However, an opportunity arose in West Africa. March-Phillipps and a crew of five distinguished themselves in what Nelson’s navy would have described as a ‘cutting out expedition’, the hijacking of a 7,500-ton Italian cargo vessel, with a valuable cargo of iron ore, moored in neutral waters off the Spanish island of Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea. Its capture also prevented it from being used to re-supply German U-boats and surface raiders. Their success captured the imagination of Winston Churchill and the new chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and on the return of the so-called ‘Maid Honor Force’ to the United Kingdom the unit was encouraged to expand, in preparation for raids on the coast of Europe. The unit was re-named the Small Scale Raiding Force. Its base as at Anderson Manor in Bere Regis and in 1942, using a variety of Coastal Forces craft, mounted a whole series of daring raids along the coast of Europe and on the Channel Islands. Some of these raids were very successful and some were disastrous.
The SSRF was expanded from three to four Troops under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Stirling, brother of David Stirling, founder of the SAS. The newly raised D Troop, under the command of Colin Ogden-Smith, was located at Inchmery House where plans were being hatched for small boat raids using limpet mines on blockade-running enemy shipping. They were evidently unaware that an identical type of operation was carried out on Bordeaux during this period by the Royal Marines, the so-called ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, using canoes and limpet mines.
The Technical Officer and explosive expert for the proposed operation was Captain C.P. Wykeham-Martin of the Royal Engineers. He was also given the task of designing and building, in conjunction with Camper and Nicholson’s of Gosport, several small raiding craft. The prototypes of these craft were hidden in a creek near Inchmery House.
In the spring of 1943 so many secret operations were going on along the coast of Europe that there was no opportunity for the SSRF to put its plans into effect. On 19 April it was decided that the SSRF should be disbanded. The men were returned to their units, mainly to No.12 Commando and their officers dispersed, some of them into other SOE units. Sadly, Colin Ogden-Smith was killed in action after being retrained as an SOE Jedburgh resistance co-ordinator and parachuted in uniform into France. And Geoffrey Appleyard, who had seen so much action before and during his time as second-in-command of the SSRF and who had ferried the two Free French agents out to the submarine HMS Tigris in bad weather, was killed in action in Sicily in March, 1943.
After the SSRF left Inchmery, the house was taken over by the Polish Sixth Bureau (Secret Service) for an unknown period, whether as an Intelligence headquarters, a holding station for agents awaiting transport, a specialist training centre or some other purpose is not known. During this period they were still sending a considerable number of men to be trained in the main Finishing School at Beaulieu.
Local rumour has it that the Poles were still at Inchmery during the run-up to D-Day in June, 1944. Another piece of evidence suggests that they may have been there until the late summer. In the stables of Inchmery House carved in Polish is the inscription ‘God Help Us’. The Warsaw uprising occurred in August, 1944. It was utterly crushed by the Germans in September while the Russians looked on from the outskirts of the city watching the Germans destroy the Polish underground army which constituted a severe threat to the Communists’ intended post-war occupation of Poland. They refused to allow the British or the Americans to support the Poles from airbases in their newly-conquered Polish territory. This forced the Allies to fly to Warsaw from a base in Italy, 900 miles away. Two hundred and forty tons of supplies were parachuted into Warsaw by the Allies in support of the Polish Home Army, and forty-one aircraft and their crews were lost in the process. The Poles and the Germans each lost over 10,000 men in the sixty-three days of bitter street fighting among the rubble and sewers of Warsaw.
No wonder the Poles at Inchmery pleaded to God for help.
Chapter V
THE PROFESSIONALS
When the Secret Intelligence Service refuses to co-operate, where do you find people to teach secret agents their clandestine skills, and who, then, decides what type of skills are necessary?
After the First World War Britain was almost alone among European nations in failing to acknowledge that Intelligence was a profession and suitable as a career for officers of our armed services. The Intelligence Corps, created during the First World War, had been disbanded in December, 1929. Regular officers with wartime experience in Intelligence had long been demobilized or returned to their regiments and many of the older and most experienced of them had retired. The three armed services had resumed their tradition of assuming that Intelligence was merely a matter of common sense, and were filling Intelligence staff appointments with officers shunted sideways for a stint of two years or less before continuing their normal careers up the command ladder.
By 1938 our military Intelligence services had been scandalously run down and were in a parlous state. Only a handful of dedicated regimental officers were serving in small Intelligence departments within the War Office. There were no plans for re-forming the Intelligence Corps and nobody foresaw the huge demands for Intelligence officers that were to be made by the creation of organizations such as SOE, the radio, cryptography, scientific and other Intelligence services. Somebody had drafted a plan to place Field Intelligence Officers in all military headquarters, but since nobody had been trained for the task and nobody had been earmarked for the appointments in the event of war, it was a useless piece of paper. It was discovered that there were only fifty former Intelligence Officers remaining on the Regular Army Reserve of Officers and all of them were now twenty years older than they had been when they were placed on the Reserve.
The 1922 edition of the Manual of Military Intelligence had recommended that businessmen, lawyers, bankers and other civilian professionals with language skills should be recruited for Intelligence work in the event of hostilities. This was used as a guide for recruiting people in 1938. A cry went out for volunteers with language skills and the 500 men who responded were placed on the Army Officers’ Emergency Reserve. They were, of course, untrained in military affairs and military Intelligence and were invited to take a course lasting ten days at their own expense! They were called up in 1939.
That same year Major Gerald Temple
r, (later Field Marshal Sir Gerald) a staff officer in a Military Intelligence Directorate, was given the unenviable task of trying, in a matter of months, to repair the ravages of decades of neglect in order to meet the need for Intelligence officers for staff appointments and for manning a re-formed Intelligence Corps. As a result of his foresight and energetic action it was possible, but only just, to fill all the Field Intelligence appointments required for the British Expeditionary Force preparing to go to France at the outbreak of war.
The creation of SOE in July, 1940, suddenly confronted officers such as Gubbins and Holland, and their superiors in the Military Intelligence Directorate, with a need for the massive expansion of their manpower, and they, too, followed the recruiting recommendations of the old Manual of Military Intelligence to handle the administration of the new secret service. However, this famous, antiquated manual provided no guidance or advice on where to find people with experience to teach the clandestine arts and crafts to the proposed army of secret agents that SOE intended to recruit.
The Secret Intelligence Service, which nobody would admit existed, was also ineffective and badly run down and was in any case hostile to the whole SOE concept. Although it had its own training schools for spies, it was extremely reluctant to compromise its own administrative and training personnel, or to disclose its own operational methods, by training amateur agents who were bound to be caught by the Nazis and forced to talk about where and how they had been trained and by whom. The SIS really wanted nothing to do with SOE and had to be inveigled into allowing several of the staff of its unwanted foundling, Section D, to be transferred to SOE, including Guy Burgess, later to be joined by Kim Philby, at the age of 28, in pitiful ignorance that the pair of them had about five years’ experience apiece as active spies of a foreign power, Russia! Neither of them was regarded by the authorities as having any experience of spying or of training spies!
The moment Colin Gubbins was appointed as head of Training and Operations in SOE in November, 1940, he got rid of Burgess whom he recognized as a drunken, homosexual rake and a security risk, but in the light of subsequent events he clearly had no such qualms about Philby. The fact that the SIS had recruited a man as blatantly untrustworthy and lacking in security as Burgess, however good he may have been as an administrator or diplomat, (which is questionable) is adequate testimony of its appalling nepotism and lack of discernment and provides ample justification for Philby’s scurrilous remarks about its professional incompetence.
The official records state that the syllabus of the Beaulieu course was based upon the training being given at the MI Wing at Lochailort (Arisaig) and at STS 17, i.e. Section D’s clandestine training school at Brickendonbury Hall, for which Philby claims to have been instrumental in drawing up the syllabus at Burgess’s instigation. Gubbins and his team had visited STS 17 to get ideas for the proposed new school at Beaulieu.
If Philby’s autobiography is read carefully it is obvious that he had already received training from the Russians in a variety of spy tradecrafts. He was familiar with codes, cyphers and the use of secret inks, knew how to use a special camera for photographing documents and was experienced in caching his spying equipment. He was also skilled at shaking off anybody tailing him, skilled in the use of rudimentary and effective disguises and in making clandestine contacts, including the use of ‘drops’, i.e. leaving messages for others to collect from dead letter boxes. It is a matter of speculation as to how much of this knowledge he incorporated in his syllabus for the Brickendonbury course and how much of it, if any, ultimately filtered through to the Beaulieu course.
Evidently nobody at the time thought it appropriate to question him in detail about what qualifications he possessed for making proposals about the syllabus, the selection of trainees and security techniques. Neither did anybody bother to ask him where he had acquired his knowledge. All that is known for certain is that the Brickendonbury syllabus provided part of the blueprint for the Beaulieu course.
It is now well known that Philby became an agent for the French Comintern in the summer of 1933, at the age of 21. He had worked for a communist underground organization in Vienna in 1933 and ’34 and had in fact organized an escape line from Vienna to Czechoslovakia for communists on the run from the Austrian authorities. In February, 1934, he had married one of the key underground organizers, Litzi Friedmann, a Comintern agent, to get her out of the country. His activities in Vienna had evidently been noted by the Soviet Russian secret service, the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), and in the spring of the same year he was recruited by an NKVD agent in England. All that is known about this recruiting agent is that he was not a Russian. Philby was later to complain that he was not given anything to do for the Russians during the next two years but careful reading of his autobiography and several biographies that mention this period of his life suggests that it was during these two years that he received some training from the Russians in various spy crafts, including coding and communications. One source said he received this training in Paris, another that it was in Spain where he made two trips with his wife, ostensibly on holiday, in 1934 and 1935, paid for by the Russians. He went to Spain again at their instigation in February, 1937, under the cover of a freelance journalist to report on the Civil War and spy on Franco’s Nationalist forces for the opposing Communists and Republicans. He remained in Spain on Russian instructions until August, 1939, four months after the end of the Civil War. By that time he had become an accredited correspondent of The Times, an affiliation that was later to bring him into contact with many influential people who he eventually used to worm his way into secret service circles. On the outbreak of the Second World War The Times sent him as their accredited correspondent to the British Expeditionary Force Headquarters at Arras, and he was evacuated from Boulogne during the retreat in May, 1940.
In the early winter of 1940 Colin Gubbins invited Philby to prepare the syllabus for the Propaganda Warfare module of the Beaulieu course. His proposals were accepted and he was enlisted to teach it at Beaulieu.
Philby claims to have gained his knowledge of dirty techniques of propaganda warfare from talking to his acquaintances in the advertising business and learning from them the dirtiest tricks of their profession! He also claims to have made frequent visits to acquaintances working in the ‘black’ propaganda section of the Political Warfare Executive at Woburn Abbey to learn what he could from them. These visits brought him into contact with senior politicians from whom he acquired some knowledge of Britain’s post-war political intentions, information which he says he passed on to the Russians.
One cannot help wondering how much of his knowledge of ‘black’ propaganda techniques was acquired not from Woburn or from his friends in the advertising business but from any training he may have received from the Russians or from reading communist handbooks for Party Organizers. The latter are full of dirty tricks for infiltrating and corrupting political organizations and inflaming the masses with half-truths and lies so outrageous that they cannot be proved or disproved.
He is reputed to have taken the ten-day agent training course at Beaulieu before joining the staff, and is said to have been an exceedingly apt pupil! He must have been laughing up his sleeve at the floundering amateurism of these early courses. Afterwards his performance as the principal instructor on propaganda warfare was regarded by his superiors, his fellow instructors and his students as outstanding, even though he had a marked stammer and imbibed such enormous quantities of drink that his contemporaries marvelled that he could stay upright and deliver coherent lectures.
Philby admits that his posting to Beaulieu took him away from the centre of things and thwarted his activities as a Russian spy, so that out of frustration he took to drinking heavily. He also admits to using the excuse of visiting Woburn to get away from Beaulieu to make his clandestine contacts with the Russians. As a civilian he was not bound by military regulations regarding periods of leave, nor was he obliged to take his share of the routine militar
y duties that tie serving officers to their bases out of working hours.
In the early autumn of 1941, almost a year after joining SOE, he was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section V, by a man he had met while working at Brickendonbury. He was transferred from the SOE to the SIS and was replaced at Beaulieu by Captain J. Hackett, seconded from the Political Warfare Executive at Woburn. Philby remained an active spy for the Russians until 1951, when he came under suspicion. He went to the Middle East as a journalist and occasional agent for the British Secret Service (even though he was strongly suspected) until he defected to Russia from Beirut on 27 January, 1963. He died in Moscow on 11 May, 1988, at the age of 76.
Two other individuals from Section D were also transferred to Beaulieu with Philby. One was Professor E.J. Patterson, the other was George Hill.
Eric Patterson was a fifty-year-old Manxman, a well known academic specializing in adult education who had somehow become a Secret Service specialist in codes, ciphers and secret inks. He had been educated in Germany in his youth, before going to Cambridge to read for his degree and afterwards, soon after the First World War, returned to Germany for post-graduate studies. He held a series of lectureships between the wars and travelled to Poland and Yugoslavia studying their systems of adult education. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was the Principal of Bonar Law College at Ashridge in Hertfordshire and during the early years of the war he was a member of the Advisory Council for Adult Education in HM Forces and served on other high level education committees. He left Beaulieu in the spring of 1941, replaced by an army officer, Ralph Vibert. In his memoirs, Vibert said he had paid visits to Liverpool to consult ‘a great expert’ on secret inks. During the war there was, apparently, a sub-department of Liverpool University known as the Testing and Code Facility that specialized in the chemistry of secret inks and possessed a laboratory which worked for the Liverpool headquarters of the Postal Censorship division of MI 5, chemically treating suspect overseas mail and passing it under ultra-violet lamps. Patterson is known to have been a lecturer at Liverpool University at one stage of his career, but it is not certain that he was the expert mentioned by Vibert.
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