Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  While my evenings were spent discussing cryptography, my days went in perusing the S.I.S. files. These were not inspiring, for they were very weak on matters concerning science and technology, since (in common with most Ministers of the Crown and their Permanent Secretaries) the average S.I.S. agent was a scientific analphabet. The most entertaining file was undoubtedly one labelled ‘Death Ray’ which was a saga in itself. Over the years the S.I.S. had become tired of reporting death rays only to be slapped down by the Service Ministries, and one S.I.S. agent had been so convinced by a Dutch inventor that the S.I.S. finally decided to show the Service Ministries how wrong they were. It therefore actually provided the inventor with money to pursue his development so that they could present the Service Ministries with the genuine article. The latter part of the file consisted of reports of visits to the inventor to inspect his progress. Invariably he had an excuse for the apparatus not working, right up to the outbreak of war. At last, when it was clear that even the S.I.S. was not being fooled any longer and would therefore give him no more money, his final report stated that although the apparatus had been a failure as a death ray, he had discovered that it had remarkable properties as a fruit preserver, and he therefore offered this invention for exploitation by the S.I.S. in any venture that it might think appropriate.

  The more I looked through the S.I.S. files, the more I was impressed by the paucity of useful information. At the same time, I could not help wondering, if there really were a secret weapon, why we had neither heard of it nor thought of it for ourselves. I began to suspect the Foreign Office translation, and to wonder what Hitler had actually said. Fortunately, a fellow guest during one of my visits to Hoar Cross had been Sir Roy Maconachie, who was Director of Talks at the B.B.C. I therefore telephoned him to see whether the B.B.C. had a record of Hitler’s speech and, if so, they would allow one of my colleagues to listen to it again. Sir Roy arranged for this to be done and I asked ‘Bimbo’ Norman, whom I was now getting to know well, whether he would go. He duly went, and returned full of indignation at Hitler’s grammar. But he was certain that Hitler had not said that he had a secret weapon, merely that he had a weapon with which Germany could not be attacked, just as England could not be attacked at sea because it had the Royal Navy. Norman’s translation ran:

  … And it is England who has already again begun the war on women and children with lies and deceit.

  They have a weapon, which they believe to be unassailable, that is to say their Navy, and they say: ‘Well, because we ourselves cannot be attacked with this weapon, we are justified in waging war with this weapon against women and children, not only those of our enemies but also if necessary those of the neutrals.’

  But one should not deceive oneself on this point. The moment could arrive very quickly, when we would employ a weapon with which we cannot be attacked.

  I hope that they will then not suddenly remember Humanity and the impossibility of waging war against women and children. We Germans don’t hold with that at all. That is not our nature.

  Also in this campaign I have issued orders to spare towns wherever possible. But naturally, if a column marches across the market square and is attacked by aeroplanes, it can happen that someone else is unfortunately sacrificed.…

  The emphasis on ‘we’ in the fourth sentence reflects the emphasis which Hitler himself made in his speech. I ought to explain that the German for ‘weapon’ is ‘waffe’ which can either mean a particular weapon such as a rifle or a whole armed service (as Hitler himself had used to describe the Royal Navy)—and indeed the word for ‘Air Force’ in German is ‘Luftwaffe’. And from the example that he quoted in the last sentence it was clear that he was in fact thinking of the Luftwaffe.

  This was very much an anticlimax, and not popular with our own Admiralty, who had been encouraging me to say that the secret weapon was the magnetic mine, partly because a German prisoner of war had said so. But I had weighed up all the evidence as impartially as I could and, although I had the opportunity to alter my report before it was circulated on 11th November, I decided to let my conclusion stand.

  The whole scare had arisen because the Foreign Office translators had put the vital clause differently. Instead of saying, ‘We would employ a weapon with which we cannot be attacked,’ they said, ‘we would employ a weapon against which no defence would avail.’ They added to the confusion a few days later when they helpfully reported that Hitler had disclosed something of the nature of the weapon, telling me that I had to look for a weapon which would blind and deafen its victims. On this occasion Hitler had said that if the allies attacked he would reply with a force that would deprive them of sight and hearing—but this merely happened to be an idiom for ‘render them thunderstruck’. So the Foreign Office did not have much luck.

  Although I had demolished the secret weapon, I did at the same time report my conclusions from a search of the S.I.S. files and summarized the results as follows:

  Apart from the more fantastic rumours such as those concerned with machines for generating earthquakes and gases which cause everyone within two miles to burst, there are a number of weapons to which several references occur, and of which some must be considered seriously. They include:—

  (1) Bacterial Warfare.

  (2) New gases.

  (3) Flame weapons.

  (4) Gliding bombs, Aerial torpedoes and Pilotless aircraft.

  (5) Long range guns and rockets.

  (6) New Torpedoes, mines and submarines.

  (7) Death rays, engine-stopping rays and magnetic guns.

  The war would see how many of these forecasts would come to pass. In the meantime Hitler had done me a great service by securing my base in the very heart of Intelligence.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Oslo Report

  TO COMPLETE my report on the secret weapon, I had returned to London at the beginning of November and been given an office in No. 54 Broadway alongside Fred Winterbotham, who had instructed his secretary, Daisy Mowat, to ‘mother’ me. Daisy, now Lady Currie, typed all my early reports; and very well she did them. Her sense of mischief would occasionally lead her to incorporate a deliberate mistake, which had to be watched for; and there was one occasion later in the war when the Prime Minister’s Secretary telephoned and she told him that I was not available. By the time that I had retrieved the call from her extension I heard a grieved voice saying, ‘This is Peck, the Prime Minister’s Secretary—is that really Dr. Jones? I have just been talking to a most extraordinary lady who asserted that you had just jumped out of the window!’ With some presence of mind I replied, ‘Please don’t worry, it’s the only exercise that we can get.’ It was this light-hearted background that gave Churchill cause to write in Their Finest Hour that I thought that my first summons to his Cabinet Room might be a practical joke.

  The Old Chief of M.I.6, Admiral ‘Quex’ Sinclair, had just died. He was succeeded by Stewart Menzies, who had previously been Head of Section V of M.I.6, but I was not to meet him for another year. The highest ranking officer that I did meet in the early days was the Vice-Chief, Claude Dansey. Various things, mainly uncomplimentary, have been written about Dansey, but once again I had a stroke of fortune at the begining of my dealings with him. Evidently he had heard that there was now a scientist in the office, and he quickly came to see me. He delighted in intrigue, and what he wanted me to do was, in this instance anyway, altruistic on his part. It involved finding employment for a deserving physicist in a Government establishment. Fortunately I was able to do so, and this initial success put me into Dansey’s good books—a fact for which I was later to be very thankful.

  Whilst on the subject of scientific recruitment, I might mention that at Bletchley I met one of the keepers in the botany department of the Natural History Museum who had volunteered for the Navy. Because there was a shortage of cryptographers, the three Services were asked whether there were any among their recruits who had a cryptographic background, and the museum keeper was one of tho
se discovered in this way because he had described his occupation as that of a ‘cryptogamic botanist’. When he told me this my comment had been, ‘The silly idiots, they ought to have known that it meant that you had a secret wife!’ He gave me a most curious look—it was some time afterwards that I discovered that although he was indeed married, he also maintained a clandestine ménage.

  Just as I was finishing the secret weapon report one evening, Fred Winterbotham came into my room and dumped a small parcel on my desk and said, ‘Here’s a present for you!’ I asked him what its background was and he said that it had come from our Naval Attaché in Oslo. This was after the Attaché had received a letter, dropped privately through his letterbox, saying that if the British would like to know about various German scientific and technical developments, would we alter the preamble to our news broadcasts in German so as to say, ‘Hullo, hier ist London…’ instead of the normal preamble, and then our would-be helper would know that it was worth while to give us the information. The change had been duly made, and a package had then been put through the letterbox. It contained some seven pages of typewritten text and a sealed box. I can remember gingerly opening the box because it might easily have been a bomb, especially because of the extraordinary way in which it had appeared. But it turned out to be harmless, and inside there was a sealed glass tube, rather like an electronic valve which, in one sense, it was. It proved to be an electronic triggering device which, our correspondent said, had been developed so as to operate a proximity fuse in anti-aircraft shells. The principle of operation was that the shells were to be made in two electrically insulated halves, with suitable electronics to record the change in electrical capacitance between the halves whenever the shell was in the vicinity of a third body.

  Besides the fuse and a description of its intended operation, there was a wide range of information, including the fact that the Junkers 88 was to be used as a dive-bomber. The German Navy was said to have developed remote-controlled rocket-driven gliders of about three metres span and three metres long, with radio control for launching by aircraft against enemy ships. The experimental establishment where this work was being carried out was Peenemünde—the first mention we had ever heard of this establishment.

  The German Army was developing rocket projectiles of 80 centimetres calibre and stabilized by gyroscopes. The projectiles were not flying straight but in uncontrollable curves, and were therefore to be equipped with radio remote control. The report mentioned Rechlin, the German equivalent of Farnborough, about which we already knew. It also told us that in the raid by Bomber Command on Wilhelmshafen in September, our aircraft had been detected at a range of 120 kilometres by radar stations with an output of 20 kilowatts. It did not state the wavelength, but suggested that we should find this for ourselves and jam the transmissions. There was another radar system using paraboloid aerials and operating on wavelengths of around 50 centimetres.

  There was also a system for finding the range of a friendly bomber by transmitting a signal on a wavelength of 6 metres, which was modulated at a low frequency. This signal was received by the aircraft and returned to the observing station on a somewhat different radio frequency so that, from the phase lag in the returned modulation, the distance of the aircraft could be determined. The observing station could then transmit this information to the bomber, so that he could position himself relative to some pre-determined target.

  Finally, the Oslo report told us about two new kinds of torpedo developed by the German Navy. One was controlled by radio for the first part of its journey and then switched to acoustic homing with microphones on the head of the torpedo so that it could steer itself towards the ship by listening to the noise of its engines. The second type of torpedo had a magnetic fuse, and the writer of the report speculated that it was these torpedoes that had sunk the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow.

  The report was obviously written by someone with a good scientific and technical background, and quite different from anything that I had so far seen in Intelligence. My first step was to take the electronic trigger tube down to my former colleagues at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, to get them to evaluate its performance. The report itself was circulated to the three Service Ministries, but nobody would take it seriously. The leading doubter was John Buckingham, the Deputy Director of Scientific Research at the Admiralty. When I tried to convince him he implied that I was an innocent in Intelligence work, and that the whole thing was a ‘plant’. His argument was that the German hoaxers had overdone it, because it was very unlikely that any one man in Germany could have had such a comprehensive knowledge of developments in so many different fields. When I pointed out that at least some of the information was genuine, he said this was an old trick (as indeed it was) in which you give your victim something genuine that you know that he already knows, in the hope of convincing him that the rest of the report, which contains the hoax, is genuine. I pointed out that this was quite a remarkable hoax, since by now A.R.L. had found that the electronic tube was much better than anything that we had made in the same line, but I could not convince him. The report was thereafter disregarded in the Ministries, which did not even keep their copies, and all I could do was to keep my own copy and use it as a basis for much of my thought.

  The value of the Oslo report was to become evident as the war proceeded, as it will in this book. I gave it publicity in my post-war lecture to the Royal United Services Institution on 19th February 1947, partly in the hope that whoever had written it would come forward if he had survived the war. But despite worldwide publicity, the only response I had was from the former Naval Attaché in Oslo, Hector Boyes, who was now a Rear Admiral. His letter said:

  I was very much interested to read in The Times a résumé of your lecture at the United Services Institution.

  Whilst serving as Naval Attaché Oslo I remember receiving the German letters.

  At that period one was inundated with various anonymous correspondence which it was necessary to sift.

  On translating the German correspondence there appeared to be matters of interest though one had a certain mistrust, the letters having been posted in Norway.

  On arrival home after the evacuation I asked about the correspondence without much result. I forgot about it, having been appointed to Japan. Your lecture shows that the writer was genuine—Is there any chance of his being Norwegian? At one period I was in touch with a Norwegian engineer who had been working in Germany on U and E boats.

  One thing against it being him is that the letters were written in excellent German.

  It confirms the lack of interest that had been shown in the Ministries—unfortunately my position in 1940 after the Norwegian evacuation was too obscure for Captain Boyes and me to have met.

  Inevitably, the question will be asked regarding my own ideas about the identity of the Oslo author. I believe that I know, but the way in which his identity was revealed to me was so extraordinary that it may well not be credited. In any event, it belongs to a later period, and the denouement must wait till then.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Plan For Intelligence

  AS INTEREST in the secret weapon died down, I was able to get on with the task for which I had gone to Intelligence. This was not to act as an Intelligence Officer myself, but to conduct a one-man enquiry into why so little scientific and technical information was being obtained by our Intelligence Services, and to recommend ways in which the arrangements could be improved. It was originally intended that the task should take me six months from 1st September: but the war had broken out, and something therefore needed to be done quickly. And so, after ten weeks which included the secret weapon and Oslo stories, I embodied my findings in a report entitled ‘A Scientific Intelligence Service’ which was completed on 7th December. The first page of this report ran:

  A serious disparity in Scientific Intelligence between England and Germany almost certainly exists at the present time. This is due in part to the extra secrecy precautions observed in Ger
many, and in part to the lack of coordinated effort in our acquisition of information.

  Parallels have frequently been drawn between the Peloponnesian War and that between England and Germany, but rarely more accurately than in the present connection. A similar disregard for Scientific Intelligence exists now in England to that which existed in Athens: Pericles, in a classic exposition of Athenian policy, stated:

  ‘Our city is thrown open to the world, and we never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands.’ (Thucydides. II, 39.)

  While it may be claimed that we do not completely emulate this abandon, yet the relative ease of obtaining, for example, air intelligence in this country, compared with the difficulty of even locating German aerodromes, renders the parallel sensibly true: Athens lost the war.

  I went on to look at the aims of Scientific Intelligence:

  The primary problem of a Scientific Intelligence Service is to obtain early warning of the adoption of new weapons and methods by potential or actual enemies. To tackle this problem, it is advisable first to consider its nature. The adoption of a fundamentally new weapon proceeds through several stages:

  (1) General scientific research of an academic or commercial nature occurs which causes

  (2) Someone in close touch with a Fighting Service, and who is aware of Service requirements, to think of an application of the results of academic research. If this application be considered promising