The Walls Have Ears
Page 4
From its inception, Trent Park was never to be referred to as a prisoner-of-war camp or a prison, but as ‘Cockfosters Camp’ or ‘Camp 11’.94 Like Bletchley Park, the fact that its existence remained unknown for decades was a testament to its success.
CHAPTER 2
M Room Operations
Before Trent Park could function for any intelligence purposes it had to be made ready; the installation of listening equipment was begun in the house and an M Room was prepared. A handwritten report entitled ‘Listening and Recording Equipment at Country House’ laid out the requirements for the new site.1 Five interrogation rooms and six bedrooms were to be wired with concealed microphones. An approach was made to the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to supply the specialist equipment.2 The American company was based in New Jersey but had offices in the United Kingdom at Electra House on Victoria Embankment in London and had previously carried out work for SIS.
The equipment was transported on the next available transatlantic journey because of the urgency of the operation. A top priority import licence was granted and the equipment, consisting of nineteen cases of wireless apparatus, was shipped in two cabins from New York at the end of 1939.3 A cypher from the Military Attaché in Washington to the War Office confirmed that it had left New York for MI1.4
The work of installation began during the latter part of 1939, and was carried out by Mr Barnes and his team (Ackroyd and Doust) from the General Post Office Research Department at Dollis Hill (London).5 All installation staff were required to sign the Official Secrets Act.6 Maintenance of the equipment became the responsibility of the Post Office Research Station to avoid a breach of security. As the first Christmas of the war approached, Kendrick began the preliminary phase of moving the administration side to Trent Park. A few weeks later, he received a letter from RCA to inform him:
We have pleasure in handing over to you the complete installation at T.P [Trent Park] in full operating condition including both recording and reproducing or play-back sections . . . The only other copy of this letter and the attached report in existence is one in our own secret files which it is of course necessary for us to keep. We should point out that certain drawings are in the possession of the Post Office and the Office of Works and you will no doubt consider whether you want to collect them and destroy them.7
The original drawings have not been declassified and may still survive in archives of the War Office or intelligence services, though perhaps they have been destroyed as directed.
The two long reception rooms of the house, labelled S.1 and S.2, were fitted with false ceilings, in line with the rest of the architecture to avoid arousing suspicion.8 Further alterations took place in May 1940 when rooms in the mansion were divided up and more soundproofing added. Work included the installation of false panels and ceilings, microphones concealed in the fireplaces, the lamp fittings, even in the plant pots, under the billiards table and in the trees in the grounds.
WITHIN THESE WALLS
On 9 December 1939, Captain de Salis relocated to Trent Park from the Tower of London as its camp commandant until 1943, when he was succeeded by Major Denis Bevan Topham.9 With a larger site, Kendrick rapidly expanded its intelligence-gathering capability to become a highly efficient and impressive operation for amassing and processing vast quantities of information. He gradually increased the staff to 515 army personnel, including administrative staff, typists, couriers, translators, engineers, cooks, administration staff and guards.10
Although he was the overall commander, Kendrick also headed the army intelligence section of the site. Some of the officers under this section were recruited because he had known them in the pre-war period.11 Amongst them were Charles Juulmann and John Burgoyne, both drafted into the Intelligence Corps in 1940. Their backgrounds provide a snapshot of the kind of profile Kendrick sought for the officers who joined his team. Charles Juulmann, born in Estonia, had served with the Signals Service, Royal Engineers in the First World War.12 In 1923, he was naturalised as a British citizen and was attached to the Intelligence Department, British Army of the Rhine (Cologne), where his commanding officer was Thomas Kendrick. In the late 1930s, Juulmann was working as an ‘examiner’ at the British Passport Office in Berne, Switzerland, possibly as cover for SIS work. In 1940, he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps and attached to Kendrick’s unit.
John (‘Sandy’) Burgoyne joined Kendrick’s unit in early 1940. A talented linguist, he had studied French and German at the University of Edinburgh.13 In May 1939, he enlisted as a private in the Royal Scots (Home Defence), and transferred to the Intelligence Corps on 24 February 1940. On 2 March 1940, he received a letter from the director of Military Intelligence:
You are selected to fill an appointment as Intelligence Officer Lieutenant, M.I.1.H at Cockfosters Camp. You should be at Enfield West tube station (Piccadilly Line) at 10 a.m. on Monday March 4th, where you will be met and given further instruction.14
During this period, the secret listeners were drawn from commissioned officers of all three services: Army, Navy and Air Force. They were selected because they had studied languages at either Oxford or Cambridge Universities, or were ex-German refugees who had arrived in Britain from 1933 and already been granted British nationality. That would change later in the war when Kendrick required only native German speakers to cope with the dialects and technical language used by the prisoners.
STOOL PIGEONS
The interrogation of prisoners was only deemed successful when used in conjunction with the M Room operation and the use of stool pigeons.15 ‘Stool pigeon’ was the term given to someone who was acting as a fake fellow prisoner. One person believed to have served as a stool pigeon in the Tower of London in 1939 and then at Trent Park, was Brinley (Brin) Newton-John – the father of English-Australian actress Olivia Newton-John – who spoke fluent German.16 From autumn 1940, he interrogated captured German pilots at Trent Park, using the pseudonym Dike or Dyke, but he also befriended them by using his knowledge of upper-class German society to gain their confidence.
Occasionally, MI9 had to assess whether a stool pigeon was suspected of not being a genuine prisoner, as was the case after one bugged conversation in December 1940. A note, which identified him only as SPF/4, read: ‘. . . whilst there is no reason to think that A674 [POW] suspects his companion [SPF/4] of not being a genuine POW, it is not of course impossible that the statement may have been made to lay a trap, though we do not feel this is the case.’17 The note refers to something the prisoner said to the stool pigeon which could have been false information. The stool pigeon in question might have been Brin, who later transferred to Bletchley Park.18
In 1940, Kendrick selected four stool pigeons after interviews with ex-refugees who were serving in the British army’s Pioneer Corps. They were Stefan Georg Klein, Werner Theodor Barazetti, Josef Lampesberger and Georg Schwarzloh19 who all transferred to Trent Park where they took on a new identity as German ‘prisoners of war’. The value attached to stool-pigeons is highlighted by the case of Georg Schwarzloh, a former German policeman in the Hamburg police and an anti-Nazi who had worked for Czech counter-intelligence before fleeing to Britain. He was brought to MI5’s attention by a former employee who commended him for intelligence work. However, by some misunderstanding, Schwarzloh had been arrested by the British authorities and categorised as a Class A internee (‘dangerous Nazi’). He was then interned and subsequently transported to an internment camp in Canada. Schwarzloh was considered so important as a potential stool pigeon that MI9 wrote to the Home Office, requesting his urgent return to Britain: ‘We are anxious for various reasons that one Georg Schwarzloh, who is at present interned in Canada, should be returned to this country . . . [we] request that this alien might be included in the next batch of internees coming to this country.’20 He was brought back from Canada and served at CSDIC until the end of the war.
The use of stool pigeons was expanded over the course of the war, such that Kendrick engaged a
total of forty-nine Germans for this work from among both prisoners and refugees who had fled Nazi Germany.21 Records of the names and details of these individuals are extremely rare, but some are known, amongst them Freiherr von Bassus, and two others named only as Reinhardt and Petrie.22 In return, stool pigeons received preferential treatment and outings as a reward, funded by SIS’s Special Fund.
M ROOM APPARATUS
The new intelligence site was kitted out with fifteen type 88A pressure microphones, nine portable disc recorders, five high quality headphones, one amplifier for loudspeaker monitoring, four switchboard assemblies, one mainframe assembly and a transformer.23 The operators were supplied with 525 12-inch double-sided acetate recording discs for recording conversations, and 58 steel recording styli, 10 sapphire recording styli and spare parts. Very little is known about the microphones that were used, except from a report which stated: ‘It was proved in practice, as was anticipated in laboratory work, that the moving coil type of microphone was the only practicable type for concealing purposes. Firstly, its size and shape were suitable, and secondly, it could be fitted and forgotten; only 2 failures were experienced over a period of three years.’24
The equipment allowed for complete versatility and flexibility. Any or all operators could listen singly or together into any one of the bugged rooms, including the interrogation rooms. Each of the eight machines could record conversations in any of the wired rooms. A separate playback room was equipped with four playback units with turntable and variable speed motor, amplifier, hypersensitive pick-up, power control switch and pilot lamps and twin output jacks.25 Eight headsets and eighty silent styli were also part of the equipment supplied. This allowed two translators to listen simultaneously to the recordings.
Circuit diagram for a microphone
Kendrick’s own office in the Blue Room at Trent Park had a playback machine similar to those in the M Room. At any time his office could be connected direct from the M Room to any of the bugged cells and interrogation rooms and listened to using either headphones or loudspeaker. He also controlled the instruments in Interrogation Room 6 via a switch which he held under lock and key; this meant that if any of the machines in the M Room broke down, his machine could be used as a replacement. With the M Room fully kitted out, the RCA wrote to Kendrick: ‘Dust is anathema to disc sound recording and so should be avoided. Thus the M Room should never be swept and that is why we have included a vacuum cleaner in the equipment.’26
The M Room consisted of three rooms and six listening stations, with the secret listeners working in twelve-hour shifts.27 The technical side of recording and listening-in was taken care of by Captain Copping of the Royal Corps of Signals. Psychologist Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dicks advised on interrogation of particular prisoners. In overall charge of the M Room was Major Cassels who had already been called up on Emergency Reserve to Military Intelligence (War Office) in February 1939.28 He was posted to CSDIC on 26 February 1940. Secret listener Fritz Lustig recalled how they operated:
We sat at tables fitted with record-cutting equipment – this was before electronic tapes were invented. We had a kind of old-fashioned telephone switchboard facing us, where we put plugs into numbered sockets in order to listen to the POWs through our headphones. Each operator usually had to monitor two or three cells, switching from one to the other to see whether something interesting was being discussed. As soon as we heard something which we thought might be valuable, we pushed a switch to start a turntable revolving, and pulled a small lever to lower the recording-head onto the record. We had to identify which prisoner was which by their voices and accents and keep a log, noting what our ‘charges’ were doing or talking about. In that log, we noted down the time of day and the subjects that we had recorded, so that the next shift could see at a glance what had been happening. As soon as a record had been cut, somebody else had to take over the monitoring, and the operator went to a different room to transcribe what he had just recorded. At the end of duty, the log-sheet was handed to the next shift so the other listeners could tell what had happened on the previous shift. Whenever a record was ‘cut’, a note was made in a column on the log sheet. It enabled the day’s activities to be seen at a glance for any of the cells.29
The secret listeners did not take shorthand notes because British intelligence needed to record every detail, as personal judgements were not permitted. Each acetate record held up to seven minutes of conversation. A carefully transcribed text could take over an hour to complete. If it was not possible to identify certain words, then a line or a series of dots indicated on the transcript the inability to recognise a word or phrase.30 The secret listeners were not allowed to guess what that word might be. After transcribing the conversation, a senior operator checked the draft for any errors, omissions or superfluous material. It was then passed to the editorial section on site.31
The ‘cut’ record from the M Room was kept for two months before being returned to the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill for re-conditioning and re-issue. The records with evidence of wartime atrocities were kept permanently. These included any reference to concentration camps, the killing of Jews, Poles and Russians, the places of mass murder (e.g. towns and villages) and who carried it out (the SS, death squads, or German army).
EDITORIAL SECTION
The editorial section was responsible for handling all Special Reports coming out of the M Room. A register was kept of all draft reports which were then carefully checked to ensure they were all finalised and dealt with.32 The register showed the date on which a report was received and the date it was finally disposed of by the section. After registering a Special Report, it was passed to the interrogators straightaway so they could check for valuable information that they needed – especially for intelligence that they had not been able to obtain during interrogation. When they had finished their checks, the reports were sent to the draft room for translation and typing by ATS personnel. The ATS officers had to have a good knowledge of current colloquial German. They also compiled extensive glossaries of technical and slang terms that could be consulted by any member of the section. The reports were translated into English, and both the German and English typed up. Any queries at translation stage were sent back to the M Room to clarify. The verbatim bugged conversations were referenced under SRN (navy), SRM (army), SRA (air force), SRX (different services), and those of senior German officers under SRGG and GRGG. The transcripts of interrogations were called Special Interrogation Reports (SIR), and intelligence summaries were known as General Reports (GR).33
A final check was made by a different officer from the one who had originally checked the translation and carbon copies were then made. An average of 80 copies could be made of each report; in the early days these were then dispatched to, for example, Air Intelligence, the War Office and the Admiralty, MI5, MI6, MI8, MI9, MI14 and Bletchley Park.34 As the war progressed, the number of departments receiving copies dramatically increased, especially after D-Day.35 A card index was kept of every POW, showing his movement and companions in his cell whilst at a CSDIC site. A subject index was also compiled of all subjects covered by POWs. A copious amount of information was being amassed that would flow into Intelligence for the duration of the war. An entry in the MI9 war diary in 1940 recorded: ‘Reports received at Cockfosters are evidence of the increasing value of the work done by the organisation.’36 The Editorial Section of the M Room was a huge manual intelligence operation – all carried out by personnel and without the aid of any early machines or computers.
Transcripts from bugged conversations were exceptionally productive in providing the first information on new German technology, warfare, operations and military capability that could not at this stage of the war have been ascertained from interrogation alone.37 Prisoners were usually held for a few days or up to about a week, or sometimes (but rarely) longer, until they had unwittingly given away all they knew. When they talked to their cellmates mainly about their families or private mat
ters, it was a sign that they had no more important material to impart. They were transferred to a regular POW camp elsewhere in Britain where their conversations were not bugged.
Felkin managed the team of RAF interrogators in the Air Intelligence section at Trent Park. He was known to the prisoners by the pseudonym ‘Oberst King’.38 He possessed three qualities which made him an excellent interrogator for Air Intelligence: charm, patience and a sixth sense.39 The interrogations were sometimes ‘phoney’, designed to make the prisoner think the British did not know very much or were stupid. An interrogator sometimes revealed only partial information, knowing that it would plant a seed in the prisoner’s mind such that he would talk about it in more detail once back with his cellmate. The prisoners were held two to a room, often from different services to encourage the talk. Did the German prisoners ever suspect? They had been warned back in Germany that if ever captured, the British would probably bug their conversations. But the prisoners soon became complacent and let down their guard. In a memorandum, Kendrick reassured intelligence chiefs that security consciousness had been encountered amongst the prisoners, but ‘this attitude was frequently broken down by careful grouping of POWs and by devising ways and means of disarming suspicion’.40
NAVAL CODES, ENIGMA AND BLETCHLEY PARK
On 12 December 1939, the remaining prisoners of U-35 were moved from the Tower of London to Trent Park.41 Four days later, Trench and Croghan arrived at Trent Park to see them again. Croghan took Sub-Lieutenant Roters and engineer Stamer out for a walk and chat in the grounds whilst Trench talked to U-35’s telegraphist Erich May.42