by R. V. Jones
(3) Ad hoc research and small scale trials are performed in a Service laboratory. If these are successful
(4) Large scale Service trials are undertaken, which may lead to
(5) Adoption in Service.
The first stage is generally public, and is probably common knowledge to all progressive countries. Frequently, therefore, the idea is born almost simultaneously everywhere; its subsequent history depends on the attitude of the Services concerned.…
The third and fourth stages are more difficult to observe, and the only method of dealing with the former is direct espionage, or the observation of indiscretions by research personnel concerned. Sometimes the recruiting of new staff, who have already attained some eminence in research, will give a clue to the type of research. The supply of apparatus by commercial firms may also furnish clues. In many ways those are the most important stages at which a good Intelligence Service should be able to give timely warning to its Government, and every effort should be made to extract the utmost from any item of information.…
Information leaks out in five ways:
(1) Accidental indiscretions (including deciphered messages) of which there are always a large number and if these are pieced together a valuable impression may be gained.
(2) Indiscretions encouraged by alcohol and/or mistresses. The results obtained by these methods are all that can be expected.
(3) Information that cannot be kept secret and yet can give useful information to an enemy. R.D.F. transmissions are one example and, in time of war, loss of apparatus by contact with the enemy is another.
(4) Direct acquisition of information by placing agents in Military Research Departments. Such a method is difficult and hazardous, and comparatively little is obtained; its value is large.
(5) Information from disaffected nationals. Frequently this is unreliable and must always be checked.
A Scientific Intelligence Service starting at the present time would have to concentrate on (1) and (3), but the other ways should be exploited to best advantage.
After surveying what I had so far done to encourage the collection of more scientific and technical information I drew attention to an important weakness in our Intelligence cover in that there was no organization to listen to German transmissions that might be connected with radar or radio navigation:
Enquiries have shown that there has been no systematic observation of evidence indicating German R.D.F. transmissions.…
I outlined an organization in which there would be a central section with the following terms of reference:
Objects
(1) To ascertain the development of new weapons and improvement of existing ones by other countries.
(2) To mislead potential or actual enemies about our own weapons.
(3) To mislead the enemy about the success of his own weapons.
(4) To assist technically in espionage and its counter (including codes and ciphers, where technicians are becoming important at the expense of classical scholars).
(5) To coordinate Scientific and Technical Intelligence between the Services.
In addition to the Central Section there should be Scientific Intelligence branches attached to the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Director of Military Intelligence, and the Director of Air Intelligence. As regards the size of the staffs that would be needed I wrote that they should be kept as numerically small as possible, and that quality was much the most important factor.
When the report was completed it was circulated to the Directors of Intelligence and the Directors of Scientific Research in the Service Ministries and to Sir Henry Tizard, who promptly wrote congratulating me on the report and hoping that it would be accepted. The Director of Scientific Research at the Air Ministry, D. R. Pye, who was still nominally my Chief, wrote in the same vein. And for a time it looked likely that the report would be accepted, and that we should soon have a healthy organization. All three Directors of Intelligence agreed, as did two of the Directors of Scientific Research. D.S.R. Admiralty, advised by his Deputy Director J. Buckingham, was the only one to disagree: and on this one disagreement the whole scheme foundered.
Buckingham’s argument appeared to have something to it. It was that, while he would like to see the collection of scientific information about the enemy encouraged, it should be assessed and interpreted not by an Intelligence organization but by scientific experts in the Scientific Directorates. He argued that these were the men best qualified because they were working on our own weapons, and that they would be in a better position to assess the incoming information if they had it undigested by someone who was less expert.
The fallacy in the argument was to be shown up by future episodes in the war. Plausible as it seems, the scientific experts in one country are not necessarily as good at assessing evidence as independent intelligence officers. It may happen for some reason that they have not developed a particular weapon either because they have not thought of it or, more likely, they have thought of it but have done some careless work which has led them to a wrong conclusion and have therefore decided that the development is not feasible. What sometimes happens is that a man thinks of an idea and tries it before the time is really ripe, and so he fails. He then invents a reason for his failure which overlooks his own deficiencies and blames instead the operation of some fundamental law. Thus, there was a doctrine that radio wavelengths of the order of 10 centimetres could not be generated by electronic valves because the time taken by the electrons to pass through the valve was much too great. This argument was fallacious, but was accepted by many scientists and engineers because we had become almost congenitally inclined to accept such ‘postulates of impotence’ in basic science. For example, the idea that you cannot send a signal with a greater speed than that of light led to the theory of relativity, with its amazingly fruitful results. The scientist is rather like Robert of Sicily in Longfellow’s poem about the battle between Robert and the Angel. Once Robert was prepared to submit, the Angel gave him all he wanted. And if the scientist is humble enough to admit that there are some things that nature will not allow him to do, whole fields of science then become intelligible. Encouraged by the success of humility, he is therefore conditioned to look for basic reasons why something cannot be done.
This chapter may be leavened by telling how I came myself to see the fallacy in the argument about the impossibility of generating centimetre waves. It arose from a demonstration at Farnborough of a very powerful loudspeaker system and amplifier system that had been developed for installation in aircraft policing the North-West frontier of India. This policing was sometimes done by punishing marauding tribesmen by bombing their villages, after due warning. Someone thought that the warning would be all the more effective if it came as from the voice of God, bellowing out from an aircraft. When the apparatus had been perfected, it was demonstrated to the Air Staff at Farnborough by mounting a microphone on one side of the aerodrome, some two thousand feet away. If you spoke into the microphone you could hear your voice coming two seconds later across from the other side. All went well with the demonstration until one of the inspecting officers struck by the curiosity of hearing his delayed voice, started to laugh. Two seconds later there came back a laugh from the loudspeaker at which everybody laughed. Two seconds later the shower of laughter returned, and I like to think that by now the volume was so great that the returned laugh was picked up by the microphone and duly relayed once again, making a system that laughed by itself.
Apart from the comedy of the situation, there was an important lesson to be learnt. This was that the time of oscillations generated by the human voice is typically of the order of one thousandth of a second, and yet these were being faithfully generated by a system in which the transit time of sound across the aerodrome was some two seconds. This showed the fallacy in the argument about centimetric waves. What really mattered was not the transit time itself, but the regularity in the time of transit. So if electrons could be persuaded to travel at unif
orm speeds across the valve they could be made to generate oscillations of considerably shorter period and wavelength than the limit which the previous careless theory had predicted. What had gone wrong up to that time was that we had failed to make sufficiently regular streams of electrons; and when this difficulty was overcome new devices such as the klystron worked very successfully. It was an example of the wisdom of the Canadian biochemist de Vignaud that ‘Nothing holds up the progress of science so much as the right idea at the wrong time’—a comment which is paralleled by ‘Crow’s Law’ formulated by my late friend Mr. John Crow, Reader in English at King’s College London: ‘Do not think what you want to think until you know what you ought to know.’
After this digression, let us return to the events of 1939. Buckingham’s argument had temporarily won the day, but I was later to show its its weakness. Experts on one’s own side are indeed valuable in the assessment of Intelligence, but their real function is not to make the final assessment—they are in effect your spies on the laws of nature which are relevant to the particular weapon under development. Usually they will be correct in their observations, and indeed more correct than most of your other sources. But from time to time they will be wrong for the reasons that I have just described and such occasions usually turn out to be very important. Their evidence must therefore be weighed impartially together with that from all other sources, and if there is a substantial consensus from these other sources in conflict with what your own experts say, then their evidence must be questioned very carefully. Fortunately for us, the Germans operated throughout the war on Buckingham’s system, and so were badly caught from time to time.
Such was Buckingham’s opposition, however, that D. R. Pye wanted to recall me from Intelligence, just as he had recalled after a month or so the liaison officers he had sent out to the various Air Force Commands. I pleaded with him not to recall me, pointing out that I had been told that I would be appointed to Intelligence for six months in the first place, anyway, and I had another three months to run. I told him that I was convinced that sooner or later something useful would come from my presence in Intelligence, and that if there was to be no organization set up I would like to see what I could do, if necessary by myself. I had already suggested to him that reinforcements were needed, and that undoubtedly the first recruit that I wanted was my friend Charles Frank, both because of his outstanding ability as a scientist and his knowledge of Germany and the German language. When the prospects for the future organization had looked good, Pye had authorized me to approach Frank, who expressed willingness to join me in London. Pye now told me, however, that he could not authorize my recruiting anybody, and so I had to continue by myself, while Frank went to Porton.
CHAPTER TEN
The Phoney War
THE WINTER of the Phoney War gave me time to build up contacts with the various sources of intelligence and to brief them. There was relatively little air activity. In fact, Neville Chamberlain had stated in Parliament on 14th September that ‘whatever be the lengths to which others may go, His Majesty’s Government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women, children and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism’, a statement which he repeated on 15th February 1940. This makes curious reading in view of our bomber offensive in the later stages of the war, which showed how far high intentions can be gradually eroded. There was another Government statement at about the same time, reporting atrocities in the German concentration camps, but many of us thought that this statement must be partly propaganda and it was not therefore given its due weight.
Air activity in the early days of the war had shown that British aircraft were much more vulnerable than their German counterparts. Single bullets through fuel tanks proved enough to stop our bombers getting home from Kiel and Wilhelmshafen, whereas the German bombers in the Forth raid had taken many bullets with seemingly little inconvenience. The single bomber that we had shot down was found to have self-sealing tanks, and enquiry revealed that similar designs had been available in pre-war years for our aircraft, but had been rejected. In fact, a nearly satisfactory bullet-proof tank was developed before the end of World War I but, with peace, the specification had been altered to include crash-proof as well as bullet-proof characteristics, since crashes were then the major danger. As a result, every design submitted to the Air Ministry was taken to Farnborough, filled with liquid, and dropped over the side of one of the buildings onto concrete, where it inevitably broke up, and was therefore rejected. Some of the designs would in fact have been bullet-proof (this being achieved by a spongy rubber envelope which closed up again after a bullet had passed through it), but none could stand the fall of 60 ft. onto concrete. It proved a lesson in the importance of making sure that the paper specification defined the essential requirement—I know of at least one other example, when one of my colleagues showed that, according to the War Office specification, the ideal material for making crash helmets for its motorcycle despatch riders would have been plate glass.
In pursuance of the policy of not bombing civilians, the R.A.F. was ordered to fly over Germany dropping nothing more harmful than propaganda leaflets, and I began to look at the reports of the air crew, who frequently stated that they encountered coloured searchlights. Since I myself had put up the scheme for pulsing searchlights to make a form of optical radar, I wondered whether the colours might be due to the use of discharge tubes instead of carbon arcs in German searchlights for this same purpose. It ought to be possible to tell simply by looking at the searchlights with a small direct-vision spectroscope which would show a continuous spectrum of colour if the searchlights were ordinary ones, and relatively narrow bands of colour if they used discharge tubes. I therefore bought six such spectroscopes for distribution to the special observers from our own Anti-Aircraft Command who were flying with the leaflet raids.
I was astonished to receive a telephone call from Major Alfred Wintle, who said that he would like to talk to me about the problem. He was the Army officer who had been posted to Air Intelligence in 1938 to co-ordinate information about the German anti-aircraft (Flak) defences. In Germany these defences were part of the Luftwaffe, but in Britain A.A. guns and searchlights were operated by the Army. Since the German defences were of acute interest to the Royal Air Force, the Flak Intelligence Section was in the Air Ministry, inter-Service honour being salved by posting an Army officer to head it. One would have expected, therefore, the officer to be an anti-aircraft gun expert but instead Wintle was from The First The Royal Dragoons. He was indeed almost a caricature of the popular idea of a cavalryman—somewhat cadaverous, with a large reddish nose and a monocle. The last, however, was no affectation, for one of his eyes was almost useless. His moustache was neatly trimmed, and his uniform immaculate.
When I went to see him, I found him sharing a room with his assistant, who turned out to be Gilbert Frankau, the novelist. Finding that I was a doctor, Frankau seemed far more anxious to get my advice on how he could restore his virility than on what we should do about the German defences. Wintle suggested that our conference, to which by now he had summoned some others, would go better with sherry all round, and so he sent an Air Ministry messenger across to a pub on the other side of Whitehall. This made the conference unique among the many hundreds that I have attended in Government offices.
I was astonished when Wintle said, ‘This is a damned good idea of yours, old boy, issuing direct-vision spectroscopes to the observers. But I have a better idea. Let’s send out spectrographs, so that they can bring back photographs, which you and I can examine for ourselves.’ A cavalryman who knew the difference between a spectroscope and a spectrograph was clearly someone to be reckoned with. He was remarkably unpopular for his cutting criticisms of most Intelligence reports. When one came in from an agent describing the German balloon barrage cable as being twenty millimetres in diameter and consisting of twenty strands each one millimetre thick, he simply wrote across it ‘This is a mathematical impossibility’ which in
deed it was. On his desk rested a photograph of himself surrounded by various Air Staff officers across which he had written ‘The brains of the Air Force’. He was to have an eventful war.
At about the same time, I was on the fringes of the magnetic mine alarm. During September the Germans began to lay magnetic mines around our ports and estuaries, and they caused a great deal of trouble. In fact, had they been used in sufficient numbers and with sufficient ingenuity they could have brought our economy to a standstill. Various countermeasures were devised, including degaussing. The highlight of the episode was the outstandingly gallant dismantling of a mine that had been laid on the foreshore at Shoeburyness on 22nd November by Lieutenant Commander Ouvry and Chief Petty Officer Baldwin. By rights it should have involved them in certain death, because we had expected that the Germans would have incorporated a fuse to explode the mine if anyone attempted to dismantle it. But, strangely, there was no such fuse, and great courage met its reward.
One of the participants in the magnetic mine discussions was my old friend James Tuck. Surprisingly, Lindemann had brought Tuck with him when he had come to the Admiralty from Oxford. Up to the outbreak of war Lindemann had tended to choose to talk more to ‘yes men’ than to those who would honestly differ from him, and I had expected that he would select one of the former. Instead Lindemann chose Tuck, who was certainly no ‘yes man’, and whose rough corners from Manchester had not been entirely rounded off by three years at Oxford. It was a very hopeful sign, for Tuck was both clever and honest, and just the man for straight action in a tight corner.
Tuck and his wife Elsie took a flat in Vandon Court in Petty France, and I often used to lunch with them. At the same time, I avoided making contact with Lindemann because I had had more than enough of the battle between him and Tizard. And now that I was in a position on the Air Staff, with Tizard also on the Air Staff, whereas Lindemann was at the Admiralty, I thought it best to make no move. Tuck told me that Lindemann frequently regretted the fact that he was not in touch with me; but having had a rough deal once, I certainly wanted to avoid any more trouble.