The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
Italian communications.29 Churchill and Roosevelt had no way of knowing how far this subterranean network had spread. Both were horrified by the presence of someone with profoundly Nazi beliefs at the centre of the nascent transatlantic relationship. Guy Liddell noted in his diary: ‘It seems that the PM takes a strong view about the internment of all 5th columnists at this moment and has left the Home Secretary in no doubt about his views. What seems to have moved him more than anything was the Tyler KENT case.’30 Kent never abandoned his beliefs. After serving his prison sentence and returning to the United States he became the publisher of a newspaper with links to the Ku Klux Klan, and spent his time asserting that President John F. Kennedy was part of a communist conspiracy.31
Precisely because of the German offensive in Europe, refugees and ‘enemy aliens’ were now a growing issue at home. Churchill wondered who among them were German or Italian agents. The Chamberlain government had worked hard to avoid mass internment, which had gone badly wrong in the First World War. That said, at least thirty men and women were interned even before Chamberlain declared war.32 In 1939 the procedure had been for local tribunals to screen suspects, and less than one in a hundred, mostly Nazi sympathisers, were interned as ‘Category A’ risks. These now amounted to 5,600 people. Around 6,800 received ambiguous ‘Category B’ status, and 64,000 people, mostly fleeing Nazi oppression, were deemed ‘Category C’ and were left at liberty. In the febrile atmosphere of May 1940, Churchill gave the stark order to ‘Collar the lot.’ In practice this meant interning all male aliens and all women in ‘Category B’. The authorities rounded up some 27,000 people, including 4,000 women, most of whom were Jewish refugees. Because this was a panic measure, many went to temporary camps, including the racecourse at Kempton Park, where conditions were appalling.
Churchill was so anxious about the fifth-column danger that he thought the detention camps might themselves become launch points for insurrection, possibly reinforced by the arrival of German parachutists. Officials tried to address the problem by deporting some of the internees to Canada and Australia. On 2 July 1940 the liner Arandora Star was torpedoed off the Irish coast with the loss of several hundred lives. Many of the dead were Jewish refugees in ‘Category C’. Churchill’s policy had backfired, and caused a furore in Parliament. Under pressure, the prime minister performed a dramatic U-turn, and by August 1941 only about 1,300 refugees were still interned, mostly on the Isle of Man.33 Many of these were dedicated fascists, and on Hitler’s birthday in April 1943 they celebrated by coming together to sing the Nazi Party anthem ‘The Horst Wessel Lied’ in the camp canteen. Importantly, many of those initially interned by Churchill should not have been, while others, often with society connections, escaped detention. One columnist for The Times wondered, if they interned all the pro-Germans in Britain, ‘how many members of … the House of Lords would remain at large?’34
MI5 found itself in a mess in 1940. Spending most of their time investigating aliens and refugees, staff soon became overwhelmed by the huge numbers involved. Because home secretaries had been consistently squeamish about issuing warrants for phone tapping, or intercepting the mail of British citizens, MI5 had no clear idea whether there was a connection between German secret service operations, Nazi sympathisers and enemy aliens. Moreover, while it was tied up with the alien problem it had little time to address other important issues.35 Having moved from the top floor of Thames House to new wartime headquarters at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, and then decamped to Blenheim Palace to escape the Blitz, MI5 described itself as being in a ‘chaotic’ state.36
Unfairly perhaps, this prompted Churchill to sack Vernon Kell, the long-serving MI5 director-general. He moved the control of MI5 from the Home Office to a new Home Security Executive under Lord Swinton, formerly secretary of state for air, and ordered him to ‘find out whether there is a fifth column … and if so eliminate it’. Oddly, Sir Joseph Ball, a Chamberlain henchman and one of Churchill’s detractors, was chosen to run its shadowy Intelligence Committee. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s anxiety about ‘the enemy within’ flitted from aliens to communists and IRA terrorists. But he understood that MI5 badly needed reform. In early 1941, he chose as director-general Sir David Petrie, who had done the same job in India. Petrie restored confidence, and MI5 went from success to success.
Although Churchill had overestimated the number of fifth columnists in Britain, his fears were not entirely unwarranted. Real traitors did exist, and MI5 set up a clever ‘false flag’ operation to catch them. Working from the basement of a London antique shop, it attracted more than a hundred would-be pro-Nazi spies into its web with excited talk of invisible ink and secret plots. Assuming they were aiding Berlin, these individuals, including both foreigners and British fascists, unwittingly offered plans of military defences, reports on amphibious tanks and details of experimental jet fighters to undercover MI5 officers. British security officers even acquired a stock of replica Iron Cross medals to award to especially zealous members of the network for their good work and prove that they really were working for Hitler.37
Churchill did not only fear subversion; he also saw it as a useful offensive weapon. Indirect warfare, including subversive propaganda and economic sabotage, fascinated him. Accordingly, he conceived of an anti-Nazi fifth column in Europe that would beat the Germans at their own game.38 Morton was no less enthusiastic. On 27 June 1940, he told Churchill that anti-sabotage was well in hand under Swinton, but ‘offensive underground activities’ against the Axis were neither centralised nor vigorous. Agreeing with the prime minister, Morton argued that ‘strong underground action … if carefully thought out and coordinated can play an important part in helping to defeat the enemy’. Indeed, Morton now believed that this sort of event-shaping activity was more important than gathering intelligence.39
Churchill acted quickly. On 16 July he gave Hugh Dalton, a Labour MP who had long opposed appeasement, responsibility for what he called ‘the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. This was the new Ministry of Economic Warfare, which encompassed propaganda, economic sabotage and special operations, including what would soon become the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. Having served as under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office in the 1920s, Dalton understood intelligence, and had experience of dealing with GC&CS intercepts. Churchill also thought that Labour politicians were more suited to underground work because it included the promotion of economic sabotage and labour unrest.40 Nonetheless, subversion was a hot potato in Whitehall. Prior to Churchill’s arrival, it had been owned by a small department of MI6 under Major Laurence Grand. MI6 was underperforming, and this section was especially weak. Although Grand was flamboyant, gregarious and well-liked, everyone knew he was not up to the task, and he had become a universal figure of fun – Dalton nicknamed him ‘King Bomba’, after Ferdinand II of Sicily, who bombarded his own cities in 1849.41 Even Grand’s senior official remarked that to have him in charge of subversion was ‘like arranging an attack on a Panzer division by an actor on a donkey’.42
Dalton’s Ministry of Economic Warfare was essential. But Churchill’s passion for forming new organisations caused trouble. MI6, the Foreign Office and the chiefs of staff all hated SOE for cutting across their jurisdictions, and for two years it remained ineffective while Dalton presided over an unholy amount of bureaucratic infighting. Menzies fought doggedly to resist its growth, insisting that SOE’s desire to stir things up imperilled the safety of his own traditional intelligence networks. Conversely, Dalton’s chief of staff complained that MI6 had ‘a “false beard” mentality … especially those who have been in the show for a very long time’. ‘Times have changed,’ he continued, ‘and “secret” activities are now the rule rather than the exception.’