by Helen Fry
The secret listeners were briefed in advance about the kind of information that British intelligence needed.26 They had to be able to pick out certain topics to record, including a knowledge of military, U-boat and Luftwaffe terminology. Ahead of D-Day, they were picking up a vast array of information, including details of the German coastal defences, bunkers and the camouflage of gun emplacements at Calais.27 This kind of information enabled Allied planners and strategists to build a comprehensive picture of what needed to be penetrated.
Secret listener Peter Hart (born Peter Klaus Herz in 1914) commented on the skills needed by the listeners to do their job:
Not only was it necessary to have a complete mastery of the German language, but often prisoners coming from regions where dialects were spoken were extremely difficult to understand, unless one knew the dialect well. In addition, we not only had to be knowledgeable about the whole arsenal of German weapons in all three services – Army, Navy and Luftwaffe – but also know about the ranks of personnel, including the infamous SS. Furthermore we had to be well informed about what was going on militarily and look out for any gossip and information which our High Command wanted to pick up.28
1. The Tower of London where the British intelligence services opened their secret bugging operation at the outbreak of war. A special area was reserved for enemy prisoners of war who in the early years of the conflict were mainly captured German U-boat and air force prisoners.
2. Inside the Salt Tower at the Tower of London. This is one of the rooms where two to three German prisoners were held together and their unguarded conversations picked up by microphones hidden in the light fittings and the stone fireplace.
3. Trent Park at Cockfosters, North London, the former home of the Bevan and Sassoon families. The estate was requisitioned by British intelligence in 1939 and ‘wired for sound’. Prisoners began arriving there in mid-December 1939.
4. Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick, a longstanding MI6 spymaster and commanding officer of the unit. Kendrick was the mastermind behind the wartime bugging operation on behalf of military intelligence branch MI9.
5. A commercial 88A pressure microphone made by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Fifteen of these were shipped to Kendrick at Trent Park. The metal casing was too big and heavy to hide inside light fittings, fireplaces or plant pots, so a team from the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill dismantled it and used only the components inside.
6. The tiny microphone that was taken out of the RCA’s 88A. This was hidden behind skirting boards and inside light fittings, ‘wired’ to a small porcelain junction box, from which hundreds of metres of wires fed under the floorboards in the living quarters all the way down to one of three M Rooms in the basement. Here the teams of secret listeners sat at special equipment.
7. Catherine Townshend, the 21-year-old British intelligence officer who took sole responsibility for acquiring the Top Secret sensitive bugging equipment and setting up new M Rooms after her immediate boss, Major Back, was posted to another job. She also interviewed and selected the secret listeners with Colonel Kendrick.
8. General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim and other high-ranking German officers arriving at Trent Park with their batmen on 16 May 1943 after surrendering to the Allies in North Africa. Greeting them is Colonel Richardson with Major Spencer of the United States Eighth Army Air Force (in the foreground) and Major General Sir Ernest Gepp.
9. German generals walk in the grounds of Trent Park with their British ‘minders’, noticeably relaxed in their surroundings in captivity.
10. ‘Lord Aberfeldy’, the fake aristocrat created by British intelligence as a welfare officer to pamper to the needs of the generals, designed to soften them up and encourage their indiscreet conversations. He was in fact a senior intelligence officer, Ian Munro.
11. An official photograph at Trent Park, November 1943. This was the generals’ Christmas card to their families. From left to right (standing): von Glasow, Boes, Hubbuch, Buhse, Schmidt, Borcherdt. From left to right (seated): Egersdorff, Crüwell, von Arnim (camp leader), Meixner, von Hülsen.
12. Samuel Denys Felkin, head of the Air Intelligence section AI1(K). His team interrogated thousands of air force prisoners and U-boat crews and amassed volumes of intelligence on new German technology as well as U-boat tactics. They were responsible for the discovery of X-Gerät and Knickebein in February 1940 – the new German equipment that enabled precision bombing. Without this discovery, Felkin later wrote, Britain would have lost the Battle of Britain.
13. A secret listener using special equipment in the basement of one of the secret sites.
14. The M Room area as it looks today in the basement at Trent Park before renovation. It is directly below both the Blue Room (ground floor) and the largest bedroom (first floor). The latter was thought to have been allocated to General von Arnim and was the most heavily bugged sleeping quarters in the house.
15. Ernst Lederer, a Jewish émigré who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. He enlisted in the Home Guard and told his family he was defending Hampstead Heath. Instead, he had been taken up by British intelligence to help the interrogation teams at Trent Park as a ‘stool pigeon’: he was disguised as a senior German officer and encouraged the generals to speak about what the British needed to know.
16. An aerial view of Latimer House near Chesham in Buckinghamshire, requisitioned by Kendrick for lower-rank German prisoners so that from 1942 Trent Park could be reserved exclusively for Hitler’s captured generals. It became the new headquarters of Kendrick’s unit, now known as Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC). To the left of the house (adjoining) is the wartime Naval intelligence block and in the immediate foreground, almost hidden by trees, is Block B.
17. An aerial view of ‘the spider’ at the rear of the Latimer estate, a central part of the bugging operation on site. Here are the newly constructed interrogation rooms, cells, an administration block, Air Intelligence section, and an M Room which housed the secret listeners.
18. Intelligence Officers with Kendrick, outside Latimer House.
19. The Naval Intelligence team outside Latimer House, c.1943–4. Ralph Izzard (tall man standing at the back, alone). From left to right (standing): unknown, unknown, unknown, Commander Burton Cope, a Weatherby brother, Donald Welbourn, a Weatherby brother. From left to right (seated): Jean Flower, Evelyn Barron, George Blake, Esme Mackenzie, unknown.
20. The Naval Intelligence team interrogated thousands of U-boat crews throughout the war and gained intelligence on U-boat tactics, new weapons and technology, and U-boat loss and production to enable the Allies to assess Germany’s ongoing fighting capability.
21. Block D at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. The close intelligence cooperation between MI9/ CSDIC and Bletchley Park began as early as 1939 and continued throughout the war.
22. Some of the female intelligence staff who worked across Kendrick’s sites. They translated the transcripts from the M Room, kept POW records and typed intelligence reports.
23. Non-commissioned officers working across Kendrick’s sites, pictured outside Latimer House. The men are émigré secret listeners; the women (also émigrés) carried out vital translation and related intelligence duties.
24. German Jewish secret listeners.
25. The White House at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. For a short time, the house was used for captured Italian generals and later for occasional German generals before their transfer to Trent Park. Within the grounds was a specially constructed complex with cells, interrogation rooms and an M Room, similar to ‘the spider’ at Latimer House.
26. American interrogator, Heimwarth Jestin, who questioned German generals and senior officers at Wilton Park before their transfer to Trent Park.
27. Some of the émigré women and secret listeners who worked across Kendrick’s sites, photographed here at Latimer House.
28. The launch of a German V-2 rocket at the experimental test site at Peenemünde on the
Baltic coast.
29. Peenemünde, site of Hitler’s secret weapon programme of V-1 and V-2 rockets. The site’s true identity was first confirmed from the bugged conversations of the generals at Trent Park and those of lower-ranked prisoners at Latimer House and Wilton Park. From mid-1943 the RAF flew over the site and photographed it, and their film footage was analysed at RAF Medmenham. The site was rendered inactive by the RAF bombing in Operation Crossbow in August 1943.
30. An example transcript of a bugged conversation from Trent Park between General Kreipe (kidnapped by SOE in Crete in April 1944) and General Bassenge (captured in North Africa in May 1943), discussing Hitler’s secret weapon programme. SR denotes ‘Special Report’ and ‘GG’ denotes ‘German General’.
31. Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, a great supporter of the bugging operation, wrote that the records of conversations between enemy prisoners of war ‘afford an excellent insight into the German character and the results of the Nazi regime’. His wish for a play to be written after the war was denied by Sam Derry, the new head of MI9. Britain had entered the Cold War and was eavesdropping on a new enemy. The tens of thousands of transcripts were locked away for almost sixty-five years before the secrets of the M Room were released into the public domain.
Access to the M Room remained highly restricted and only staff working there were given the key. The vast majority of other intelligence staff did not know of its existence. Cynthia Turner, who transferred to Latimer in 1944 from the 102 Halifax aircraft base at Pocklington (south of York), recalled:
One day, I was given privileged access to the M Room by senior WAAF officer, Olga Sieveking. Olga took me to the end of the passage to our offices and unlocked the door, taking me inside. I then saw several Jewish sergeants listening to telephones, which obviously explained the origin of the SD/SR reports. I had signed the Official Secrets Act and did not speak of this until a few years ago.29
Cynthia’s own work had involved going through the reports of conversations to mark important information for intelligence purposes; for example, where the Germans were constructing the V weapons at Peenemünde. She passed information on to relevant departments of the Air Force, Army and Navy. ATS officer Lucy Fielding Addey worked first at Latimer House, but also spent time with CSDIC (Mediterranean) as an intelligence officer in the Information Room.30
WOMEN AND INTELLIGENCE DUTIES
Once Latimer House and Wilton Park were fully functioning from 1942, an increase in staff became necessary, particularly to deal with the influx of prisoners. Kendrick received authorisation to increase the quota of ATS women working across his sites31 which enabled him to draft in German women who had been forced to flee Nazi Germany. As native German speakers, they proved invaluable for carrying out vital clerical duties, typing, translation work, keeping prisoners’ records and sifting the intelligence for its level of importance. Amongst them was Gerda Engel (born Breslau, 1921) whose father was a dentist in Breslau. Her family was forced to flee to England in 1935 after the Nazi regime forbade Jews to hold professional jobs. During the war, Gerda was based at Latimer House and Wilton Park where she became close friends with Susan Cohn (also from Breslau and born the same year).
Susan had emigrated to England on a domestic permit in July 1939 and obtained work in North London. On the day war broke out her employer dismissed her, ‘not wanting a German living in her house’, so Susan joined the Engel family and trained as assistant in the Engel dental practice.32 During 1943, Susan joined the ATS, with a posting to Fenham Barracks in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After a number of other postings, while on leave in London she caught up with Gerda Engel, now a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps, who recommended Susan for a transfer to the same unit.
In December 1943, Susan was invited for a selection interview at the War Office where she underwent various aptitude tests. Four weeks later, she received a letter for transfer to Latimer House to join Kendrick’s unit:
It was all very exciting. I had a railway ticket to Chalfont and Latimer station and was told that I would be met there. A very smart naval officer and his driver waited for me in a jeep outside. As I got into the car the driver said to me, ‘I bet you a packet of cigarettes that you’ll be a sergeant by tonight.’ I didn’t believe him. That evening, I was unexpectedly promoted to sergeant and I owed him a packet of cigarettes!33
Susan was allocated to a typing pool, but since her typing was rather poor she soon found herself transferred to a department for checking prisoners’ documents. The work was highly classified and she spoke to no one else in the camp about it; nor did she have any idea what the other intelligence staff were doing on site. At one point, she was surprised to come across documents for her former English teacher from Breslau, whom she knew was not a Nazi. He was being held at Latimer House. ‘I put in a good word for him,’ she said. ‘And he was soon transferred.’ During her time at Latimer House and Wilton Park, she met secret listener, Fritz Lustig.34 They married on 6 June 1945 with Kendrick’s blessing as a commanding officer’s permission to marry was necessary at the time for those still serving in the army.
The role of women in intelligence is often a hidden story of wartime, and is difficult to recover. Many were modest about what they did, and believed it was not worth talking about. There was also the matter of secrecy – the oath that bound all intelligence ranks across Kendrick’s sites. Having signed the Official Secrets Act, the émigré women and secret listeners were bound by oath to withhold whatever classified information came their way. The unit’s existence had to be protected at all costs. As they carried out their daily duties, they could not discuss their work, even with other intelligence staff in the camp.
It would be at least sixty years before some of them broke their silence – and only after they were sure that the official files had been declassified. The majority went to their graves bearing British intelligence secrets. Most did not live to see their story become public knowledge.
CHAPTER 9
Rocket Science
The year of 1943 started well for Kendrick when his services to British intelligence were honoured with an OBE from the King. It recognised the success of his three centres, but most specially the discovery of X-Gerät at Trent Park. Norman Crockatt congratulated him on ‘the best merited OBE of the war’, and went on to say that the material emerging from CSDIC ‘was of such vital importance and marked a credit to the staff who had worked hard and loyally to bring it about. Therefore the OBE was as much a tribute to their efforts as also being a personal triumph for you as their leader’.1
Kendrick had just returned from a transatlantic trip where he had attended meetings on behalf of MI6 with intelligence chiefs in New York and Washington, including officers at the FBI and the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services. His visit, in December 1942, was less than a month after the capture of General von Thoma and the success of Operation Torch, which marked the beginning of the end for German occupation of North Africa.
Whilst in America, Kendrick discussed matters of joint intelligence and the training of new American intelligence officers at his sites in England, thus forging closer Anglo-American cooperation. In New York he visited the MI6 headquarters of the US Operations, known as the British Security Coordination (BSC). It was based in Room 3603 of the Rockerfeller Center and headed by William Stephenson, a wealthy Canadian businessman. Stephenson was on the payroll of the British Secret Intelligence Service and carried out operations with Allen Welsh Dulles (the first director of the Office for Strategic Services). Kendrick never spoke about his mission to America and no official documents of his meetings have yet come to light.
Within weeks of Kendrick’s return, on 11 March 1943 in a cell at Latimer House, a paratrooper (A77) gave away information about projectiles to an infantry soldier (M11). He had told his cellmate: ‘I was very amused yesterday when they [interrogation officers] showed me a drawing of the sloping ramp rocket projector.’2 Their conversation revealed technical details about launch ramps
. References to Hitler’s secret weapon programme had been made by prisoners in the Tower of London as early as autumn 1939, but their comments were vague. The Oslo Report of November 1939 had mentioned Peenemünde, but British intelligence had nothing concrete to verify the references. Aerial reconnaissance missions in 1942 over Peenemünde had failed to identify anything unusual about the weapons site and the photographs were simply filed at RAF Medmenham.3 By late 1942, the interrogating teams at Latimer knew about a possible German programme to develop long-range rockets because of information sent to British intelligence by two secret agents working behind enemy lines.4 The warning about the first long-range rockets came from an untried source that could not be deemed totally reliable without further independent corroboration. It would take a revelation eleven days later from Hitler’s top commanders held at Trent Park for the information from A77 and M11 to be taken seriously. It came in a bugged conversation on 22 March 1943 in which General von Thoma told Crüwell:
… but no progress whatsoever can have been made in this rocket business. I saw it once with Feldmarschall Brauchitsch, there is a special ground near Kunersdorf (?) … They’ve got these huge things which they’ve brought up here … They’ve always said they would go 15kms into the stratosphere and then … You only aim at an area … If one was to … every few days … frightful … The Major there was full of hope – he said ‘Wait until next year and then the fun will start!’ … There’s no limit to the range.5