Beaulieu

by Cyril Cunningham

  It took more than two years of constant adjustments to produce a set of courses that satisfied the needs of the Country Sections and met their approval. The length, type and content of the Beaulieu courses underwent many changes. In the earliest days specialized courses were being run by Philby exclusively for propaganda agents, in the days before this subject became the prerogative of a break-away section of SOE that became the Political Warfare Executive. Running concurrently were special time-filling courses for the Spaniards, and special agent training for Dutch W/T operators. The first consolidated courses under the Munn regime were intended only for high-grade resistance organizers and incorporated railway sabotage and reception committee training which taught agents to select suitable landing grounds for Lysander aircraft, parachuted agents and supply drops and how to arrange an appropriate number of sub-agents to collect and hide new arrivals and their supplies. It very soon became apparent that these were specialized subjects and that the Beaulieu instructors lacked the necessary expertise. These topics were made into specialized courses and were moved elsewhere.

  Later still, when the principal topics of the course had been stabilized and standardized, a variety of shortened versions of the three-week course were introduced. Some of these were officially described as ‘Elementary’ and lasted ten days. They were intended to be ‘appreciation’ courses to familiarize personnel from other Intelligence agencies with SOE’s activities and some were run specifically for Public Relations purposes for a variety of service and civilian units. In 1943 a two-week postgraduate course was launched, but it failed to gain the support of the Country Sections and only two such courses were run. They were intended to train students destined for particular missions in agent techniques and allowed time for revision of the trainees’ weakest subjects. But time could not be afforded by the Country Sections.

  Some of the successful agents and some who had worked in the Resistance before being flown back to this country for formal training said that their training was unrealistic and a waste of time, but these were in the minority. The Polish authorities and the Norwegians are known to have been mostly eloquent in their praises, with some reservations, and their nominated students were queuing up for places on the Beaulieu courses. One Polish report on the school, dated September, 1944, (the time of the Warsaw uprising) spoke of ‘the very high opinion they have in the Field of the results of training at STS 33’. This was The House on the Shore.

  The administrative organization of the Beaulieu training staff eventually settled into five departments. Department A dealt with Agent Techniques; B with organizing exercises; C with Enemy Organizations; D with Propaganda, and E with Codes, Ciphers and Secret Inks. However, the staff was not rigidly compartmentalized.

  Chapter IX

  SPYCRAFTS

  During the inter-war years J.F.C. Holland, Colin Gubbins and some of the other founder-members of SOE had made a study of the organization and modus operandi of guerrilla and terrorist organizations all over the world, including the IRA. Also, MI 5 and the Special Branch of Scotland Yard had gained much experience of overt and covert Communist organizations and their methods of operation. In addition, Stanley Woolrych and several former Intelligence officers in SOE headquarters pooled their experiences from the First World War.

  There was, therefore, a considerable body of knowledge quite separate from that possessed by the Secret Intelligence Service, which had refused to help, on various ways of arranging, controlling and operating networks of secret agents. The Beaulieu instructors were able to use this material for teaching the SOE trainees the fundamentals of sub-agent recruitment, motivation and organization and how to protect their networks by using a variety of personal and organizational security measures, including mobility and evasion.

  There is an old adage which says that MI 6 recruited agents from among the aristocracy in order to penetrate the highest levels of society and provide an ear to the policy-makers and strategists, working from the top down. Whereas SOE was said to work from the bottom up, worming its way into the midden of society to spawn as much trouble as possible as widely as possible among the lowest levels of the social scale. Scurrilous though this is, there is some truth in the underlying principle. SOE did try to work from the bottom up by penetrating the work forces of essential services, the utilities, the railways, the telephone and communications networks and workers in factories. In this respect it had much in common with communist penetration.

  The type of person recruited as a sub-agent and the number that made up a cell depended on the opportunity that their occupations afforded for causing disruption or for providing access to premises or important information or for gaining access to professional, occupational or trade associations, including trade unions. An important consideration was the degree to which the sub-agent could be trusted to keep secrets and exercise discretion.

  The trainees were taught how to create a network of sub-agents and arrange them into independent cells with a variety of chains of command, and how to link them with alternative methods of horizontal and lateral communication, with cut-outs in the system to prevent the network being rolled up from one cell to the next by counter-espionage organizations. The cell might consist of only one person, as, for example, the key Norwegian scientist working inside the Norsk Hydro plant that produced heavy water for the Nazis’ nuclear research programme. It might consist of dozens of agricultural workers and their farm vehicles organized to collect several canisters of arms parachuted into an isolated field and whisk them away to hiding places in scattered farm buildings.

  The cut-outs could take various forms. Perhaps the best known is the Dead Letter Box, a cavity in a wall, a tree or a litter bin or piece of furniture or any other inconspicuous orifice, into which messages could be left for others to collect. An alternative was to use a ‘post box’, for example a busy chemist’s shop into which messages could be dropped for later collection. Yet another cut-out was the use of a once-off ‘dead’ messenger, an innocent party to carry wittingly or unwittingly a message from one point to another. There are numerous variations.

  The recruitment of suitable couriers to link the cells was also taught at Beaulieu. Trainees were told to seek them from among people whose occupations provided natural cover for human traffic, or whose occupations took them out and about. These included doctors, dentists, postmen, train drivers and guards, itinerant salesmen and drivers of all classes of vehicles.

  The payment and remuneration of agents and helpers was also part of the curriculum for trainee resistance organizers. There was, apparently, an agreed scale of remuneration for services rendered, depending upon the motives for helping. A doctor or a railwayman might help out of patriotism, but a smuggler or a black marketeer demanded their own prices for services rendered. Others would be satisfied if their expenses were defrayed, or if they were supplied scarce or rationed goods such as food or petrol.

  The selection and acquisition of premises was a vital element in agent operations. Agents and sub-agents needed to be very mobile, not just to keep in touch with their networks but for their own safety so as to avoid going habitually to one address and going regularly at particular times of the day. They needed widely scattered premises for themselves to live in, places for meetings with other agents, as well as ‘safe houses’ in which to hide if they were being pursued, and for storing illegal equipment such as supplies of arms, radios, forging equipment or illegally acquired documents like real or forged ration cards and passes. Some of the agents who were most successful at eluding arrest never spent more than one night in the same place and some made good use of ‘Nobby’ Clark’s survival training to sleep rough in hides built in the countryside rather than risk living in towns or villages.

  All students destined for enemy-occupied territories, whether as secret agents or to work with local partisans, were given many hours of training in the recognition of enemy uniforms, equipment and the functions of a host of political, military and civil organizations wh
ich constituted a threat to their existence. The subject is far more complicated than one might expect. The enemy organizations were of two sorts. One was exclusively German, the other was indigenous and specific to the occupied country in which the agent had to operate, for instance the local police forces, including the criminal police and their informer networks, as well as the special police forces raised by the occupying Germans by recruiting criminals and Nazi sympathizers, such as the much-hated Milice in France.

  At the apex of them all was the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the RSHA, the Reich Security Headquarters, colloquially known as the Gestapo. The Gestapo, the Nazi Party’s own security organization, was a complex tangle of organizations each with their own names, which penetrated every level of German politics and society, all spying on each other as well as upon every aspect of the military and social fabric of Germany which was riddled with informers and informer networks. It included the infamous SS that ran the concentration camps. The branch of the Gestapo that the arrested SOE agents were most likely to encounter was the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, which had a pre-war strength of 100,000 detectives, agents and informers in Germany.

  The Gestapo oversaw three main branches of state security and eventually seized the fourth, the Military Intelligence service, the Abwehr. It controlled the German secret police, the Sipo, and the German equivalent of our CID, the Kripo. The Nazis added their own iniquitous security service, Himmler’s SS troops and the Sicherheitsdienst.

  The Sipo (very roughly the equivalent to our Special Branch but with more distinctive political implications) and the Kripo sent units into occupied countries to control their civilian equivalent police forces. All the German services used a range of well-known methods for recruiting informers, making use of rogues and thieves, offering cash rewards for information, persecuting those who failed to inform if they were in a position to do so, blackmailing them by threatening their innocent or helpless relatives. No device was too dirty or underhanded for them to use.

  The Abwehr, under Admiral Canaris, was an independent military Intelligence organisation roughly equivalent to our own military Intelligence directorates and the Intelligence Corps. After the attempt on Hitler’s life in July, 1944, it was taken over by the Gestapo. It included, like our Intelligence Corps, two field organizations, the Geheime Feldpolizei or GFP, the secret field police akin to our own Field Security organization, and the Feldgendarmerie, the military police equivalent to our redcaps.

  The Gestapo seized control of all the police services in the occupied countries and had to build its own networks into the social fabric of each of the newly conquered countries. The foundations had often been laid in advance of military conquest through its political organizations within such countries as Austria, Czechoslovakia, Sudetenland and even in Norway with its pro-Nazi Quisling party and in Holland where a substantial number of the native population was originally pro-Nazi.

  In almost all the occupied countries the Germans formed national secret police forces out of their local sympathizers and criminals to police the native population, and these local forces were as cruel and ruthless with local ‘offenders’ as were their German masters. There was only one occupied country where the Germans failed to find enough local recruits to man their puppet police organizations and that was Poland.

  Keeping track of all these organizations, their uniforms, equipment and their modus operandi required a large amount of Intelligence material from the SOE Country Sections. They were able to acquire enemy weapons and equipment and in some cases uniforms to send down to Beaulieu for Woolrych and his team to use in an updated form of instruction that was reminiscent of the system that had been used for training spies during the First World War.

  There is an amusing story of how a pile of dirty German uniforms, bundled up with string and with no outer covering, was dumped out of a passing train on to the platform of Beaulieu Road station. The head porter, Percy Pearce, noted that the parcel was addressed to The Rings, which, despite all the tight security surrounding the place, he knew to be the headquarters of ‘the funnies’. He phoned the School’s HQ and asked them to come and collect it. He often had to phone them since a considerable number of ‘lost’ foreign women and men alighted by mistake from the London train at Beaulieu Road station, one stop short of Brockenhurst, their intended destination. Beaulieu Road station is situated in a desolate part of the New Forest, miles from Brockenhurst, Beaulieu and Lyndhurst. There were no names on the station platforms in those days to indicate one’s whereabouts and none of the station staff called out the name of the station. The calls had ceased and the nameplates had been removed at the outbreak of the war to prevent enemy agents or invasion forces from finding their way about the country.

  These uniforms were worn by members of the School’s staff when subjecting the students to exercises in resistance to interrogation. They were also displayed to the students during lectures on recognition of enemy forces. But the School did not possess the complete range of enemy uniforms and unit badges and had to make do in many instances with pictures which were shown on an epidiascope, the forerunner of the modern overhead projector. Recognition exercises of uniforms and equipment, and how to identify the various units by their equipment and badges, were frequent.

  The Beaulieu tutors were evidently unable to keep pace with all the changes in enemy organizations and unit badges throughout occupied Europe. In a memo to the training department of the Polish secret service, a senior Polish Air Force officer who had been sent on the Beaulieu course in the summer of 1943 wrote, ‘I propose that we should eliminate from the course the teaching about the German army. Polish stations possess more detailed and recent information.’

  Spies and secret agents are useless unless they can keep in touch with their controllers. There are very few means of communication; they are radio and telecommunication transmissions, written communications and visual and auditory signals. Equally, there are few modes of communication; they are radio or telecommunication signals, the spoken word and couriers, and carrier pigeons or the postal services.

  Spycatchers are well aware that communications are the weakest spot of an espionage network and deploy their efforts accordingly by monitoring the air waves and telecommunication networks and making extensive use of mail interception and strict control of the movements of people. But even totalitarian regimes are unable to block all movement and communications within their homeland and conquered territories or between them and the outside world. They still need to trade with the outside world, even during periods of warfare. Iron and Bamboo curtains are a myth. They are always riddled with holes and they are often threadbare in vulnerable places. So the Nazis were compelled to allow human, postal, telephone and radio traffic within their empire and also between Germany and its conquered territories and non-belligerent nations like Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, various African states and with South America. What they did not at first appreciate was that most of the world’s telecommunication and postal traffic and much of its air traffic was routed through Britain or one or other of the British dominions and colonies! But that is another story.

  The principal and preferred mode of communication for secret agents is the fastest, that is, radio transmissions or what was called Wireless Telegraphy or W/T, originally using morse code and a hand-operated key. All the students seem to have received some training in the use of morse code before they arrived at Beaulieu and many, if not all, were required to practise their skill while on the course.

  A good W/T operator may be able to transmit and receive messages at about twenty-five words a minute, maybe more. But a more usual standard to which non-specialist operators were trained in the armed services during the war was ten words per minute. Even short messages could be on air for several minutes, enough time for radio-locators to obtain a fix on the position of the transmissions. The Germans were particularly adept at radio-location using radio direction finding (RDF) vans and other ruses like cutting off power supp
lies, if necessary block by block and street by street, and watching for the transmissions suddenly to cease. Radio traffic was very vulnerable to interception and location.

  Early in the war SOE struck upon the idea of sending their outgoing signals over the normal BBC overseas transmissions and no attempt was made to conceal the fact that they were signals. At a certain time of the day, or evening, an announcer would reel off, often in English, a list of meaningless phrases like ‘The plum pudding is hot’. The meaning would be known only to an agent in a particular circuit in any one of the occupied countries, and could mean ‘Cancel the operation planned for tonight.’ As D-Day approached the volume of such signals increased enormously. Those of us who lived through the war will remember hearing these transmissions on our ordinary wireless sets between normal programmes during the evenings.

  To prevent indiscriminate reading of intercepted signal traffic, senders have long made use of codes (a jumble of letters) or ciphers (a jumble of signs or numbers such as is used to call up a function on a computer). For some reason, during the early part of the Second World War, most of our intelligence services used the same system of coding, called the Playfair Code, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone. It comprised blocks of five letters or characters and could be transmitted by an expert at about two hundred characters a minute using a manual key. Some messages took twenty minutes or more to send. It took a great deal longer to encode and decode than it did to transmit. The Playfair code was soon compromised through the carelessness of operators caught by the Germans and was abandoned as too dangerous. By 1943 students were being taught the Delastelle system of coding.

  The whole subject of codes and ciphers is very complex and the skill of encoding and decoding requires an aptitude for it if it is to be done with a modicum of efficiency. It is doubtful if most of the agents trained at Beaulieu had been previously tested for their aptitude for coding and so the task of learning to do it must have been a real chore for a high proportion of the students.