Kenneth Benton, The ISOS years Madrid 1941-3

8/3/2019 Kenneth Benton, The ISOS years Madrid 1941-3

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The ISOS Years: Madrid 1941-3Author(s): Kenneth BentonSource: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 359-410Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/261155

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Kenneth BentonThe ISOSYears:Madrid 1941-3

During the period 1941-3, a beginning was made in the processof deceiving the German High Command about our offensiveplans. The Bletchley Park cryptographers, B Division of MI5 andSection V (counter-espionage) of MI6 worked hand in hand touse the newly achieved decodes of German radio traffic, knownto us as ISOS, to build up a strategic deception plan which effec-tively wrong-footed the High Command on D-Day. It inducedthem to believe that the Allied attack would be in the Pas deCalais area, and even after the landings they remained convincedthat 'the real attack', by a non-existent 'First United States Army',would follow. For a fortnight after D-Day they kept six divisionsin the Pas de Calais.'Our work was done in the utmost secrecy, and the existence ofthe all-revealing ISOS traffic was kept secure by officers, secretar-ies and codists for thirty-five years. The morale among the staffemployed in what was often boring, repetitious work, was high,perhaps because they knew that whatever disasters might beoccurring in North Africa and elsewhere, in their own special fieldthey were winning.Between MI5 and Section V officers there was close and cordialliaison, as required by the interlocking of their work systems. It istrue that there was a mole in our midst, but during these yearsPhilby fully supported the project; Soviet interest in defeating theGermans was equal to ours.In the earlier years (1940-1) the main aim was to block Germanattempts to infiltrate the UK with their spies, but it became clearthat as well as keeping the Abwehr case-officers content with theirapparent coverage of events in wartime Britain, we could use ourturned Abwehr agents for a process of strategic deception.In January 1941 the Twenty Committee was set up to 'exercisea steady and consistent supervision of all double agent work'Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and NewDelhi), Vol. 30 (1995), 359-410.


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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryduring the last four and a half years of the war. It met once aweek and held its last meeting in May 1945. It instructed the case-officers on exactly what information should be sent to Germanyby their double agents.Misinformation about the extent of Luftwaffe bombing raidsand later of the Vis and V2s, false reports of beaches beingprepared for the second front and finally, as stated above, thecreation of an imaginary American army and the bases from whichit was to be launched, all helped in the grand deception.Our work was an effective contribution to what was being doneon a very large scale. The exploitation of ISOS traffic was onlyone of the many forms of deception adopted by the Allied Com-mand. But the flow of false information from the Twenty Commit-tee had the advantage that its effectiveness could be directlyassessed by the reaction of the Abwehr case-officers.For some details in the following pages I have referred to SirJohn Masterman's book The Double-Cross System (Yale Univer-sity Press 1972), a very clear description of the deception processwhich somehow manages, for security reasons, to avoid any men-tion of ISOS, on which the whole thing depended.To put my work in Madrid into perspective, I must brieflydescribe my activities in the preceding three years.

Vienna 1937-8In the mid-1930s, my family became closely acquainted withMarcus von Leitmaier, a senior official in the Austrian ForeignMinistry, and his three daughters, who all came to stay with us inEngland. It was arranged that I should spend one or two yearsteaching English at the Theresianum College, a Catholic institutionin Vienna, and I took up my post in 1935, when I was twenty-six.It was felt that this would help me considerably in my studies toacquire a General Honours degree in French, German and Italianas an external student of London University. After passing myFinals I expected to take up teaching as a career, either in Austriaor the UK. However, in 1937 I met two persons who changed mylife completely.My future wife, Peggie Lambert, was working in the CommercialDepartment of the British Legation, compiling economic reportsand acting as secretary to the Commercial Counsellor. She had

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Benton: The ISOS Yearsbeen married at eighteen, divorced at twenty-two and left withtwo very small boys with whom she spent the next seven years invarious parts of Europe, living on an allowance from her mother-in-law, who thought more highly of her than of her own son. Twoyears previously she had had to find work to pay for the boys'education in England, so took the job at the Legation.The other contact was with Captain Thomas Kendrick, theVienna Passport Control Officer, who had a separate office fromthose of the Legation and Consulate, and no diplomatic or consu-lar status. It was through Peggie's acquaintance with Kendrickthat I met him and was offered the chance of a job as his assistant.I had no idea what this job entailed but accepted very willingly, andin the autumn of 1937 went to London, where I was interviewed bythe Director of Passport Control, Maurice Jeffes, and by the so-called Inspector General of Passport Control, Admiral Hugh Sin-clair, who had in fact nothing to do with the PCD but was theChief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.The interview with Jeffes was perfunctory, because he knew, asI did not, that I would not be engaged in passport work in Vienna,but intelligence. His office was on the first floor of BroadwayBuildings in Westminster, and afterwards I was taken through adoor at the back of the building to a flat in a house in QueenAnne's Gate, and to the office of a short, red-faced man, who forsome reason wore a bowler-hat while he was interrogating me.The Admiral was a remarkable man. He had been with Beattyat Jutland,and spent some time in an open boat after his battleshipwas sunk, when he was alleged to have told Beatty that he hatedthe sea. Owing to the built-in reluctance of the Foreign Office togive any help to the intelligence service, he had to run MI6 on ashoe-string, choosing where possible representatives who werereceiving pensions from the armed services - most of themwere former Rhine Army officers - and supplementing their salar-ies with bonuses of ?20 or so at Christmas for good work.The Passport Control cover was useful in two ways: the visafees augmented the miserly annual sum obtained from the secretfund, and although Passport Control Officers (PCOs) were veryrarely granted diplomatic immunity before the War, their officesappeared to have official status, often being inside consulate prem-ises, and there was the rule that they could not operate against thecountry in which they were stationed. This gave them superficial

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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryprotection and also made possible useful liaisons with local intelli-gence services.Maurice Jeffes, before his appointment as Director of PassportControl, had been PCO in Paris, and tended to disapprove ofPCOs who did no passport control work. This was an attitudefrom which I had to suffer in subsequent years.Sinclair asked me questions about the languages degree whichI had just been awarded, my other education and knowledgeof foreign countries, and then said without further ado that onKendrick's recommendation he would take me on at a salary of?500 a year, free of tax - this was a concession from the InlandRevenue - but that if he did not feel I was up to it I would bedismissed without any right of appeal.I returned to Vienna and started work at the Passport ControlOffice as soon as I could leave the Theresianum. I still had noreason to think that my work would be anything but dealing invisas. On my first morning I learned the truth. Captain Kendrickdid very little passport control work, which was in the hands of avery efficient examiner. He was fully engaged in intelligence andhad as assistants Miss Betty Hodgson and Mrs Margaret (Bill)Holmes. I had previously met both these ladies at the parties theKendricks quite frequently gave.I had expected to begin dealing with visas, but instead wasbrought in to one of the back rooms where Bill Holmes passedme a letter addressed to somebody with a Czech name in somestreet in Vienna and asked me to translate it. I opened the letter,called Bill, and said, 'Look, I can't do this; it is in Czech.' Shesaid, 'Oh, I'm sorry; how stupid; hang on for a moment.' At theback of my desk there was a little open bottle of colourless liquid,with a brush, and she dipped the brush in the liquid, passed itover the whole of the front of the letter and to my amazed eyesred writing appeared at right angles to the Czech text and it wasin German. Then she turned the letter over and did the same onthe rear side, so that I had two sides of what was in fact a Germanreport.

I began to translate - it was obviously from somebody inCzechoslovakia reporting about events in the Sudetenland wherethe Germans were already planning to take over. After that almostall my work was of this kind. As far as I remember I never hadany training in visa work; I was always working with Bill andBetty in the back rooms.

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Benton: The ISOS YearsThey had been, I gathered, in the Vienna station for quite a

long time and their task was to correspond with agents in variousparts of Europe by writing letters to them in secret ink, which ofcourse disappeared, and then turning the letters round and writingcrosswise, harmless letters addressed to other, notional, people.The correspondents, as far as I remember, lived in Czechoslovakia,Hungary and Italy, particularly the south of Italy and Sicily. Thereports I translated were in some cases in Italian, and this was thefirst time I realized that one reason why I had been recruited wasbecause I spoke Italian and was in fact the only person in theoffice who did so fluently.But most of the reports were in German.Evidently Kendrick had recruited people who travelled to thesedifferent countries and reported back to him by secret ink on whatthey had seen. The reports that I remember particularly well werethose from Augusta in Sicily, giving details of Italian battleshipsand other vessels in the naval base there. We received quite anumber of reports about the Tenth Flotilla MAS (Decima FlotillaMAS), the special naval unit headed by Prince Borghese, whichemployed the E boats in which our Admiralty was very muchinterested. They were very fast boats, each with two torpedo tubes,and the idea was that they would penetrate our naval ports likeAlexandria and Gibraltar, loose off their torpedoes under coverof night, and escape by sheer speed from the immediateresponse of our guns and aircraft. At night, of course, they couldnot have been seen and at that time, I think, our ships had noradar. What we received from Czechoslovakia I cannot remembervery well, but we must have had some reports from Germany,because Germany was of tremendous interest to us in 1937 andwe all expected that an attack on Austria would follow some time,although we did not know when.On 2 March 1938 Peggie and I were married in the Consulatein Vienna. We had wanted to be married in the Anglican churchthere but the chaplain was a man we disliked so much that wethought it would really cast a cloud over our marriage if we lethim tie us up. So the Consul officiated, with a Union Jack spreadover his office table, and the ceremony was witnessed just by ourfriends in the office. We flew to Venice, had a fortnight's honey-moon, and came back to find, to our amazement, that there wereBrown Shirts parading in the streets. Austria had ceased to existas a separate country.At once everything began to change. Until then we had had the

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Journal of ContemporaryHistoryLegation, the Consulate and the Passport Control Office. Verysoon our Legation was dissolved and all that was left was ouroffice and the Consulate, now created a Consulate General, whichgave a certain amount of immunity for consular employees underthe Vienna Convention, but not for us.For the time being, life in the office seemed to carry on as usual.The letters were coming in and being translated; we were sendingback our reports to London once a fortnight and we moved intothe Consulate General building in the Wallnerstrasse for betterprotection. In the past, obeying the rule, we had never operatedagainst Austria; in fact, there would not have been any intelligenceworth getting there. But we certainly must have operated againstGermany, and now that Austria had become part of Grossdeutsch-land we ought not to have been still operating against Germany.I am not sure whether Kendrick did or not. By this time I washelping the examiner with visa work, which had increased substan-tially, because the Vienna Jews were trying to leave the country.Three months later Kendrick was arrested. He and his wife hadleft by car to go to England on leave, and were stopped by theGestapo, somewhere along the route. Kendrick was arrested andhis wife escorted back to Vienna where I met her and stayed thenight at her house to help her to get in touch with people. Thenext day a young Vice-Consul, Cecil King, and I went to theGestapo headquarters in the Hotel Metropole. King made aformal protest about Kendrick's arrest, which was politelyrebuffed. Then I asked if he could be released at once. I was toldno, so I produced a parcel containing Kendrick's pyjamas andshaving things.It is worth noting that it was the Gestapo who arrested Kend-rick, whereas the main German intelligence service abroad at thattime was the Abwehr, the German Defence Intelligence Service.But of course the charge against Kendrick was that he had beenoperating against Germany, in which case it was a question forthe Gestapo. He was held for forty-eight hours and given a badtime, but not tortured. I think it very unlikely that he disclosedany information. But what is certainly true is that he was told agreat deal about what they knew of his work, and of our work ingeneral, throughout Europe. I saw him when he was released andhe was a badly shaken man. We discussed what had to be doneand I accompanied him and his wife to the airport for their flightto England.

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Benton: The ISOS YearsI was now in charge, because as soon as Kendrick was arrested,

the visa examiner, and the two women who did all the secretwork, were packed off to London and I took over the visa office.In the meantime, of course, I had burned everything secret. Aswe had no official protection, I was afraid that the Gestapo mightjust come in and search the whole office, so everything that couldbe burned was destroyed.But I was now faced with the task of running the Visa Section,which was a very big job indeed. It had grown considerably eversince the Anschluss. The examiner had been working extremelyhard and had been given some secretaries to help in examiningvisa applicants. Mostly it was a question of Jewish people. TheJews in Vienna, who were being atrociously treated by the nazis,were desperately trying to get out to go to Palestine or anywhereelse. Now, at this time - 1938 - Britain still counted in its EmpireIndia, the Caribbean islands, most of middle Africa, the BritishConcessions in China and very many parts of the Far East includ-ing, of course, Hong Kong and Singapore. For all these places wecould give visas and the Jews were desperate to know how to getthem. Some were able to go to Palestine, particularly if they hadenough money to get what was called a capitalist visa. If theyhad ?1,000, which they could transfer to Israel by irrevocable deedof gift, we could give them a visa. But many of them never had achance. They were rounded up by the Germans and, although thiswas before the real Holocaust began, they were packed off intrains to unknown destinations. We saw the most dreadful scenes.I have never worked as hard as I did then. In the end I managedto get fifteen helpers as examiners, who dealt with the applicationsall day long. Every morning I used to give a talk to a crowd thatfilled the courtyard of the Consulate building. I had to tell themthat if they had a relative in Canada they had a chance; but thatthey must do this and this. If they wanted to go to India, therewas no hope at all unless they were doctors or dentists, when theymight be allowed visas, and so on. I gave these lectures everymorning and then throughout the day supervised the stamping ofvisas when there were any to give or told weeping people thatthere was no chance for them. It was a very bad period.All intelligence had, of course, stopped the moment that Kend-rick was arrested. It was just plain visa work, and in the end itwas decided to send out another man to take charge. This was

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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryGeorge Berry, an experienced visa officer from Riga in Latvia,who took over and ran the office very efficiently.

Riga 1938-40I was called in to the Consul General's office one day at the endof August, and he showed me a telegram from London saying thatPeggie and I were to be transferred at once to Riga in Latvia. Idid not know what had happened until much later, when I foundthat one of Kendrick's agents had been arrested by the Gestapoand interrogated. He was now due to come up for trial. HeadOffice was afraid that, although in fact I had never had anythingto do with him - he was run entirely by Kendrick - I might besubpoenaed to appear as a witness. The Germans would thenmake a great display of showing what they knew about the workof Passport Control Officers, and our office in particular. Thiswould be very bad publicity. Moreover, I might be sent to prison,because at the time in question, as already stated, I still had nodiplomatic or consular immunity at all, although I was nowworking inside the Consulate General. So it was decided that Ishould go to Riga as Berry's replacement and would be given therank of Honorary Acting Vice-Consul. It does not sound verymuch, but actually it meant that I had some diplomatic immunityunder the Vienna Convention.We packed quickly, leaving friends in the Consulate General toarrange for our furniture and heavy gear to be forwarded to Riga,and took a plane to Prague and then on to Warsaw, where thePCO, Colonel Shelley, entertained us. Next day we flew in anancient Junkers aircraft to land first in Kaunas and then in Riga,where winter was already beginning to be felt.The PCO, Captain Leslie Nicholson, was welcoming, and Isettled in quite quickly. Peggie was now unemployed, but she hadmuch to do finding a pleasant flat and furnishing it with our thingswhich, surprisingly,followed us quite shortly after we arrived. Shewas also busy writing her diary of what had happened to us inVienna and beginning to record first impressions of life in Latvia.Her account of what happened to us in the next two years is inher book Baltic Countdown (Centaur Press 1984), and I will onlysummarize it briefly in the following pages.The first year was very pleasant. We had the boys out in the

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Benton: The ISOS Yearssummer; we had a boat on the Lielupe river; we made very goodfriends and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. In September 1939 warbroke out and I had a summons from my territorial unit, theHonourable Artillery Company, ordering me to report at onceand join up, but I was not allowed to, because at that time nobodyin the Foreign Service was released for military duties, so I stayed.We only had two intelligence sources. One was a Latvian andthe other was not an agent but a liaison with the head of theLatvian Military Intelligence Service, which was useful. So we sentin these reports, but most of my time was spent in visa work, ofwhich there was a great deal, because there was already tensionamong the Jewish community.In late 1939 came the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pactwhich, in effect, divided up Eastern Europe into the spheres ofinfluence of the Russians and the Germans. The Germans wereto have Poland and the Russians the Baltic States. We did notknow this; but everyone knew that the Pact had been signed. Andthe fact that the Germans, the rabid anti-communists, had signeda defensive pact with the Russians was a sinister enough devel-opment.The Jews in Latvia were most anxious to get out. Among themwere many who had been in Palestine as immigrants and had goneback to Riga to their relatives. Now all they wanted was to go backto Palestine. As time went on it became clear that Hitler'sintentions were different from what had been expected. The Jewshad been sure that the Germans would annex Latvia, but whathappened was that the German Baltic families, including some ofour own friends, had to leave for Germany as immigrants. Itbecame obvious that at some time or other the Russians wouldannex the three Baltic states, which they did, of course, in June1940.

The story of the Soviet invasion is in Peggie's book, togetherwith our rather adventurous journey home after our delegationhad been wound up and all the papers had been burned all overagain - we were quite used to burning quantities of secret docu-ments by this time.Our return to England was rather late, due to our attempt tohelp the remaining British nationals to find some destinationto which they could go, and we left a month after consular immun-ity had been withdrawn. Many British subjects finally got visas togo through Russia to the Black Sea and then Constantinople and

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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryothers were sent to Australia, some of whom got stuck there forthe rest of the war. We finally set off on 1 September 1940 andwent by rail to Moscow and Vladivostok, then by sea to Japan,and from Yokohama to Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal and thenback to England. We had travelled 23,000 miles.

Bletchley Park 1940-1We crossed the Atlantic out of convoy in the Duchess of Richmondand arrived in Liverpool at night with the docks ablaze. Nextmorning we were able to get a train, which took us, not to London,because the station had been bombed, but to where we could takea bus and arrive at Broadway Buildings.Everyone was a little surprised that we had arrived so quickly;although in fact it had taken us two months, and we were given afew days' leave and went down to Erdisley, where the boys' schoolhad been transferred, and visited my mother-in-law, and my fatherand family. We then returned to London and reported for duty.We were told that our first job was to explain why, although ourLatvian agent had come on the air three times, his messages wereindecipherable, so we were taken by car to Bletchley Park wherethe code section had been evacuated. Before we had left Riga wehad trained our Latvian agent as a stay-behind agent and wirelessoperator; Peggie was involved in much of this, including the useof a special code which we made up ourselves, using two identicaldictionaries and two copies of the Riga telephone directory.We had sent copies of the dictionary and directory to HeadOffice while we still had the use of a King's Messenger. The codewas quite simple. Each word in the message was looked up in theGerman section of the dictionary and the page and line numbersused to form a five-figure group. When the coded message wascomplete in the form of lines of five-figure groups, it was reciph-ered by using groups formed by selecting numbers taken from thetelephone directory. Thus, 'Your message 8', that is, Ihre Sendungacht evolves like this: dictionary page 29, line 4, is Ihre; dictionarypage 56, line 13, is Sendung; dictionary page 2, line 7 is acht. Thebasic message therefore begins: 02904 05613 00207. In the Rigatelephone directory the selected page is 49 and the selected lineon the page is 84. The telephone number on page 49, line 84is 47825. The first group of the reciphered message, ready for

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Benton: The ISOS Yearstransmission is therefore 02904 plus 47825, without carrying,equals49729. To decode, subtract the reciphering group 47825 from thefirst group 49729 and you get the original group 02904 = Ihre.To find where to start copying numbers from the directory, thevery first group in the transmitted message might read 04984,which indicated the page and line numbers in the directory. Afterthis indicator group the reciphered message would begin 49729,as shown above. Unless anyone knew that the directories werebeing used for deciphering, the method was unbreakable.Peggie taught our agent how to transmit in Morse by using aspecial device supplied by our Technical Aids Section in Broadway,which dispensed with the conventional Morse-tapper. A metalpanel was used, with channels containing series of electrical con-tacts, each of which corresponded to a digit from 0 to 9. By meansof a contact being slid along the selected channel, the correctseries of dots and dashes was supplied to the transmitter. Ouragent was an intelligent man, as well as a very brave one, and hemastered the system quite quickly under Peggie's tuition. Howhe concealed the transmitter and Morse panel we never learned.It was a risk he accepted.Colonel Maltby, the chief assistant to Brigadier Gambier-Parry,head of the radio staff at Whaddon Chase and Hanslope, hadcome out to Riga shortly before the Legation was closed down,and he and I tested the small transmitter we were going to supplyto the agent. We chose part of the forest on the Riga Strand andset up the set at nightfall. It took him some time to get what hecalled a thumping clear signal from his operators at Hanslope,and a Morse message which acknowledged his signal, but he didit. As already stated, our agent later showed his competence byactually sending the three messages with the help of his littletransmitter and codes.At Bletchley Park we were sent to see the Head of Codes whotold us that his codists could not understand the messages, sothere must be something wrong with the codes. I asked to see thedecrypts; and at once saw that the messages were perfectly good,but that they were in German. (Our agent never spoke anythingelse but German to us.) They were not very helpful; there was acertain amount of information about Russian activities, but thatwas it. There were no more messages from our agent and weconcluded that the Soviet police or NKVD had traced his signalsand located him. If so, that might well have been the end of a

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Journalof ContemporaryHistorygood man and a Latvian patriot. I tend to think so, but to thecynically-minded there is another explanation. He might under-standably have seen little future in his highly dangerous contactwith us and have reported to the Soviet authorities as soon as wehad left the country, and the NKVD (as it then was) had rejectedthe tempting idea of using the link with MI6 for supplying us withfalse information, and simply taken over the man, his codes andradio set for whatever use they could find.In Bletchley Park there was first of all our main code section,with a large staff of codists, which dealt with communicationsbetween Head Office and stations all over the world. Secondly,there was the special code section which dealt with our most secretmaterial, ISOS, which I shall be discussing later. Thirdly,there wasthe headquarters of GC and CS (now GCHQ), the cryptographers.Nearby at Whaddon Chase, was the headquarters of BrigadierGambier-Parry,who was in charge of the Service's wireless com-munications. The transmitters and receivers were at HanslopePark.

While we were there the Head of Codes asked to see me. Thiswas Captain Hastings, a very colourful naval officer, who said heliked the cut of my jib, and what would I say to being his assistant?He did not tell me at the time, but I learnt afterwards, that whathe really wanted was someone to take over from him while hewent hunting, because he was a member of two of the local hunts,which were still operative during the war. This seemed to me thebest thing on offer, so I agreed. I was taken on as Assistant Headof Codes and Peggie became assistant to the head codist. Wefound lodgings in a farmhouse, where we were well looked after.The boys came and joined us for the holidays.We were summoned to visit Head Office in Broadway Buildingsto be interrogated by Naval Section about what we had seen inVladivostok. We had been there for a week, and had had anopportunity to view the whole of the naval harbour from a hillabove the town and make a careful note of all the ships we couldsee. So we were interrogated about this, and on a number of otherthings including how the Russians had behaved, what regimentswe had seen, and so on. We had of course made notes of all theregimental numbers we could see on the epaulettes of officers andmen in the Riga streets. While we still had codes, we had sentmessages back to London giving all the accounts we could of theRussian invasion forces.

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Benton: The ISOS YearsI started work, and one of my jobs was to see every telegram

that came into or went out of Headquarters (which would havebeen quite impossible for one man to do later on). I found thisextremely informative and interesting, especially the intelligencetelegrams to and from our stations throughout the world, andmessages and instructions about the work of the new SOE (SpecialOperations Executive), which had been invented by Churchill andDalton and had cover in the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Itsobjective, at first,was to cause havoc among the nazis by spreadingblack propaganda. Later on, of course, it did a good deal of activesabotage work, but at this stage it was still elementary (and, as itseemed to me, rather ridiculous). I am talking here about Novem-ber 1940 and most of the SOE messages I read began: 'Spreadthe following whispers', and then gave a number of false rumourswhich were supposed to cause alarm and despondency among theGerman population, such as stating that sausages made at such-and-such a place contained human flesh.But there was one telegram that struck me as extremely interest-ing. In fact, it was to affect the whole of my career. It had beensent to the Head of Station in Madrid and asked for his view onthe appointment of a Section V officer to fill the vacant post ofPCO in Madrid. I knew that officers with experience of PassportControl work were very few in number, and that therefore I mighthave a chance of landing the job, whatever it proved to be. Atthat time I had no idea of what Section V was about.Head Office in Broadway comprised sections designated byRoman numerals and covering political, air force, naval, military,economic, scientific and administration requirements. There wasalso Section V, which was for counter-espionage. There had beenvery few telegrams from or to Section V among those whichhad passed across my desk, because the Section was still at thedevelopment stage and part of its correspondence was in a specialcode. Before the war began, and for one or two years afterwards,there had in fact been little counter-espionage activity to occupythe Section. Although, especially after two MI6 officers werehijacked in Holland in September 1939 and comprehensively inter-rogated, the Germans had a good knowledge of MI6, our acquaint-ance with the German intelligence networks was very limitedindeed.But two important thingshadhappened. One was the appointmentof Colonel Felix Cowgill to be Deputy Head of Section V,

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Journal of ContemporaryHistoryunder Colonel Valentine Vivian. Cowgill was an extremely experi-enced counter-espionage officer, having served in India for manyyears and being the author of two important books on the subject.He set about calling the Chief's attention to the importance ofcatching German spies. But the identification and apprehensionof spies in the UK was the task of MI5. What Cowgill wanted wasto identify spies before they came to this country and pass thenames and details to MI5 for action. His first objective was toassemble all information about the German intelligence servicesand how they operated abroad.The Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or German Security Head-quarters, embraced the Gestapo (including the secret police), thecivil police and the Abwehr. This last title means defence, but wasused for the German Defence Intelligence Service, headed byAdmiral Canaris and at the time in question spread through sec-tions (Aste or Stellen) located in Berlin (the headquarters), majorGerman towns and places in France and other occupied territory.Only the Abwehr, not the Gestapo, was allowed to operate abroad.

When I had read the Section V telegram, I went to see Hastings.He had said when he took me on that on no account was I to getanother job, so I had to take my courage in both hands and saythat this job looked particularly suitable. I said that I spoke Italianvery well and thought I could learn Spanish, that I had had intelli-gence experience abroad and so on. He said I could go and seeColonel Cowgill. I took Peggie with me and we went by the shuttlefrom Bletchley Park to St Albans, where we were dropped at oneof the two villas which Section V had requisitioned for its offices.I knew that if I got the job Cowgill would also want to see mywife. He sat in a room with paper piled everywhere and made mewelcome. He had checked with Head Office on my previous careerand seemed to approve. Before he began to question me I was'indoctrinated'. I had, of course, already signed the Official SecretsAct form, but this was special; I had to swear a binding oath thatI would never reveal to anyone at any time, and this meant forever, the existence of a most secret source known as ISOS, withoutproper authorization. I swore.Then Cowgill explained that ISOS was the result of decodingthe secret radio communications between the German DefenceIntelligence Service (Abwehr), and its branches and outposts,including those in German missions abroad. He said that theGermans had no idea that their secret method of encoding and

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Benton: The ISOS Yearsdecoding messages could have been broken, as was obvious fromthe prolific way they used it. By reading their traffic, which wecalled ISOS, we were learning almost everything about theirService and its agents, the instructions issued to them and theirreports, with the comments of the case-officers. He said it was ofinestimable value to our Defence Staff to read the questionnaireson all subjects which the agents were expected to satisfy. Cowgill'slined face broke into an unusual smile. 'We almost know whatthey've had for breakfast.'Then he went on to explain that the Abwehr was recruitingand training agents for penetrating the United Kingdom and theAmericas, and sending them to their destinations through Spainand Portugal, mainly, while for a few special cases they couldorganize flights through Switzerland and Scandinavia. But muchinformation about the agents might be sent by bag or specialcourier, in which event we were 'blind'. This was especially thecase with names, which were usually sent by separate means, andphotographs. If I were selected for the job in Spain, it would bemy task to fill in the gaps in the ISOS information.By this time it was fairly clear to me that I had been selectedalready, so they must have been rather short of candidates. Thismade me hope that the weak point in my qualifications, Spanish,might be treated leniently. It was. Cowgill asked me whether Ispoke Spanish. I said I had an honours degree in Italian and feltsure that I could acquire Spanish without difficulty. (This was agross exaggeration.) What I think had helped him to choose mewas my knowledge of Passport Control work and agent-running,and that I knew how our stations were administered. Also that Ispoke German. This last point interested him at once, and heasked his secretary to find some ISOS decodes, still in German.It was fascinating for me to read an original German messagefrom Ast Hamburg to Abwehr Madrid about a newly-recruitedagent. He was an unnamed Irishman, who had been in gaol inoccupied France until the Abwehr released him and recruited himas a penetration agent.

I was told that I would be PCO in Madrid, with one examinerand a clerk for visa work and one secretary, indoctrinated in ISOS,to help with my work for Section V, which would mainly consistof identifying the German spies as they passed through Spain andsignalling their arrival date in their target countries. I pointed outthat my wife had the same qualifications as I for this work, being

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Journal of ContemporaryHistoryfluent in German and Italian and having had experience of agent-running. I told him about our 'stay-behind' agent. He said that hewould like to meet her, as he had no other candidate in mind. Herecruited Peggie that afternoon.At a second meeting with Cowgill, I asked him if the stationhead in Madrid knew about my work, and he said that he did notand would not be told about ISOS. In fact, the only person in theEmbassy to be indoctrinated, besides Peggie and myself, wouldbe the Ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare. Cowgill agreed with methat Hamilton-Stokes, the station head, would be unlikely to wanta subordinate who could not discuss his work with him, but hesaid Basil Fenwick, responsible for the Iberian area, would notagree to my having separate status, and I would have to sort outthe problem on the spot. With misgivings, I had to accept; theprospect of the job was too attractive to quarrel about personalstatus. Or so I thought.We later spent several days in St Albans, met the officers whowould be dealing with our information, and learned a great dealabout how the Section worked and was organized. There wasobviously a very close link with MI5, and it was explained to mehow a Section V case-officer, dealing with the impending arrivalin the UK of a German agent, would be in constant touch withthe MI5 officer who would take charge of him on arrival. Theobject was not only to stop an enemy agent from operating, butwhere possible to 'turn' him. He could be given the simple choiceof either being tried and shot as a spy or agreeing to work entirelyunder the orders of the MI5 case-officer.When a spy was successfully turned, the profit was twofold. Onthe one hand, the Abwehr case-officer in Hamburg or in oneof the Stellen in Lyon, Angers, etc., would believe that he had auseful agent on his books, and thus have less need to recruitothers. On the other, the false information which the British case-officer would send to Germany through his agent's form of com-munication (e.g. radio messages or secret ink letters) could beuseful for strategic deception. But in both cases it was essentialthat the information sent to the Germans should appear to begenuine.MI5 had already realized, from the study of ISOS trafficbetween Abwehr case-officers and their headquarters, that someof their agents in the UK were fudging their reports, and theseagents were being rounded up and either turned or held for trial.

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Benton: The ISOS YearsBut fudging would always be spotted in the end, and what wasneeded was to supply information so convincing that the Abwehrchiefs would believe that they were already adequately served bythe UK agents. Hence the need for the Double-Cross System, soably described by Sir John Masterman in his book of that name,which explained how the Twenty Committee, of which he waschairman, met every week to determine precisely what infor-mation could be given to the Abwehr through their false agents.The first task was for the turned agent to report back to hisAbwehr case-officer in Hamburg or Paris that he had arrivedsafely and found accommodation, but in his secret ink or radiomessages he would emphasize his difficulties in settling in, hisfailure perhaps to find the money which had been cached for him,and so on. There would often be bickering between him and hisGerman case-officer, but the latter would strain every nerve tomake things easy for his protege. Then the agent would send inhis first report, probably of little value, which would be tactfullycriticized. As time went on, he would proudly announce that hehad found a sub-agent, give full details of him and demand money.Later, he would send reports containing real, and often, from theGerman point of view, valuable information, but this would havebeen given the seal of approval by the Twenty Committee. Manyof the vicissitudes of life as a foreigner in wartime London, withits bombs, rations and blackouts would be described by the agent,who was perhaps safely ensconced in a house in the country eatingmilitary rations and far from danger, except when his Germancase-officer would send him to assess the bomb damage in thedocks area or Coventry.MI5 men like 'Tar'Robertson, who ran Tricycleor Tomas (sic)Harris, the half-Spanish officer who developed the GARBO net-work, were brilliant, imaginative men. At the end of the warGARBO had fourteen registered 'agents' and eleven official 'con-tacts', all notional. He was awarded the Iron Cross, and thecitation, found in captured Abwehr records, included the words:'The difficulties in maintaining and extending the (GARBO) net-work have been increasing recently, but were mastered by(GARBO) with an utter disregard for all personal interests andby giving all he was capable of. (GARBO) has himself beenhiding for weeks, separated from his wife and family.' GARBO, aSpaniard, was run by Abwehr Madrid, and they continued to

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Journal of ContemporaryHistorybelieve in him until the end of the war. He was given the MBEby the British government.This briefing from Section V and MI5 colleagues about therunning of double agents in the UK was invaluable to me when Ibegan work in Marid, because, in assessing a man's potential as adouble agent, it was essential to know how he would be handledin the UK.

Shortly afterwards Peggie and I left by flying boat for Lisbon.We were given a very warm welcome by Ralph Jarvis,the SectionV representative. Jarvis was theoretically on the staff of the MI6Head of Station, but his offices were completely separate and,although his boss knew nothing of what he was doing, they seemedto get on well enough, and this gave me hope, against my betterjudgement, that my position in Madrid might be similar. Jarviswas also PCO and thus had two staffs; only some of his intelligencestaff were indoctrinated in ISOS, but they had a good deal to do,since Lisbon was a very active take-off point for German agents.Part of his work which interested me very much was his use ofISOS material to identify German agents working in Lisbon andtry to discover their sources of information. It had soon becomeclear that some of the Abwehr agents reporting on Portugueseaffairs were fabricating their reports. One of them spent most ofhis time on the beach and found all his information from publisheddocuments and reference books.

One of Jarvis's assistants had found me a very good second-hand car, a Buick alleged to have previously belonged to L6onBlum's secretary, who had arrived in Lisbon as a refugee. We hadbeen warned that in Madrid both food and drink were scarce,since the city was still suffering from the effects of the Civil War.So we bought what we thought we would need and started off onthe long trip over the mountains to Spain. We had formed a verygood opinion of the Portuguese, who even in 1941, when they hadevery reason to expect us to lose the war, displayed Union Jacksin many shop windows, for to the Portuguese the 'oldest ally' labelstill meant something. I had been warned against the dangers ofbandits in the mountains and given an automatic and a bulb filledwith strong ammonia, but the only Spaniards we met on the tripwere friendly, even if they often looked starved.

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Benton: The ISOS YearsThe Beginnings: Madrid 1941

We arrived at the Ritz in Madrid. I had stowed the gun and thebulb into my pockets when the porter took the car to the garage.It was unfortunate that the ancient lift was crowded. Bodies werepressed together, and the bulb blew its stopper. By the time wereached our floor, the people with us were gasping for breath, butwe had to pretend to be as mystified as they were.The following morning I went to see Sir Samuel Hoare. I knewlittle about him, except that he had been a great skater, a CabinetMinister, First Lord of the Admiralty and the co-author of thedicey Hoare-Laval Pact. When I was ushered into his study, hewas sitting behind a huge desk at the end of the long room, andthere was only one paper on it, probably a letter from the FOabout my appointment. He stood up, moved round to two arm-chairs which faced each other in front of the desk and made mesit down. I thought at the time that it was a carefully stagedgesture to put a new addition to his staff at his ease, but in facthe always greeted me in this way. In later years, when I had aposition of some responsibility at Headquarters, I sometimesgreeted new acquaintances in the same way. But I never managedto present a clean desk, as Sir Samuel did.I have always felt grateful to him for his handling of this firstinterview. He showed much interest in the ISOS traffic but didnot ask how I hoped to use it. The only warning he gave mewas not to 'fall foul of the Spaniards'. I must record that during thewhole of my time in Madrid, the Ambassador always supported mewhen I needed him, with the exception of one contretemps whichI shall mention shortly.Hamilton-Stokes, the Head of the Madrid SIS Station, was anawkward man but an experienced intelligence officer, who hadbeen in various other posts. He had quite a decent-sized staff, buthe was very much frustrated by the fact that the Ambassador hadput limits on what he could do. 'He must not fall foul of theSpaniards', just what had been said to me. This meant that he hadonly a few agents and did not really produce a great deal. Nowhe found himself landed with a young subordinate who was dealingwith matters that he, Hamilton-Stokes, was not allowed to knowabout. He objected, very naturally.The whole situation came to a head about a month after Iarrived. I received a telegram from London which instructed me

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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryto go to Gibraltar at once because of ISOS information about aGerman agent who had arrived there, and I was to liaise with myopposite number. I came back to Madrid and was summoned tosee the Ambassador, who said that Hamilton-Stokes had told himthat I had gone to Gibraltar without his authority. Was this so? Isaid I was afraid it was but I had had instructions from Londonand could not do anything about it. He asked if I had told Hamil-ton-Stokes where I was going. I said yes; he had not liked it, butI had said that the trip was on instructions from London. TheAmbassador said that he could not have the intelligence staff adivided house, and that I would have to leave for home withinforty-eight hours. I went back to my office, which was separatefrom Hamilton-Stokes's and in a different street, and encoded amessage to Cowgill marked 'Most Immediate. Decipher Yourself',(the way to get rapid action). Both Peggie and I felt rather shat-tered. The Ambassadress, Lady Maude Hoare, had arranged aparty that evening for the whole staff, including locally-employedpeople, and I said that it would be tactless for us to attend. ButPeggie said she would not miss the occasion for worlds, so wetook our staff and turned up at the Residence on time.

Lady Maude, who perhaps felt that she must not show off infront of 'other ranks', wore a rather dismal-looking knitted dress,which she had decided to liven up a little by wearing her splendidnecklace of large, natural pearls. She greeted Peggie as the latestarrival among the diplomatic wives and took her to meet SirSamuel. The poor man was embarrassed, because he could obvi-ously not wish Peggie a pleasant tour in Madrid when he had justsacked her and her husband, but Peggie grasped at a very tenuouslink with the Hoare family as a conversational gambit. 'My Nanny',she said boldly, 'used to be a close friend of a colleague wholooked after the children of Admiral Hall, your godchildren. Sheused to see you in the nursery, Sir, when you visited them.' Heseized the subject very willingly. 'Of course I remember NannyLambert', he said genially, and they spoke about the two nanniesuntil Peggie could make her escape.

A telegram from the Permanent Under-Secretary (i.e. the Head)of the FO came back the next day, addressed personally to theAmbassador, who summoned me. He did not show me the tele-gram, and it was only twenty years later that I learned what thePUS had telegraphed. The gist was that Mr Churchill wished toinform the Ambassador that the work I was to do was of consider-

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Benton: The ISOS Yearsable value to the war effort. Sir Samuel told me that he gatheredthat my work was of great importance, and that although he hadnot so far had any chance of seeing it, he accepted that I musthave liberty to get on with it. But he said he would only agree tomy staying in Madrid if my official posting was separated fromHamilton-Stokes's. This was agreed, and I received a telegramfrom Fenwick appointing me head of a separate station, to beknown as Iberia. I broke the news to the Head of Station, whoexploded. 'Doesn't that fool Fenwick realize that Iberia meansthe whole peninsula? Are you supposed to be in charge of Jarvisas well?' Of course this was not what Fenwick had meant, and Itried to calm Hamilton-Stokes down. We remained on outwardlyfriendly terms, but I did not expect any help from him in my work.We set up the visa side of the office, with a small room for meto use on the few occasions when I would have to deal withvisa applicants, and bought an ancient Ratner safe for our ISOSmaterial. After a spell in hotels, we found a pleasant flat off theCastellana, with a garage for the Buick, and exchanged courtesyvisits with members of the diplomatic staff. Then we set to work.Madrid was still suffering from the effects of the Civil War.People in the streets looked cowed and half-starved. Those whohad been on the wrong side could not get jobs, and many wereshot every morning at dawn. A Falange mob stoned the Embassywindows and our cars, while the Germans took photographs. Onsome days the temperature rose to 95 degrees, and there was noair-conditioning in our apartment-block. But we were young andhealthy, and the rations sent from Gibraltar were a great help. Weworked early and late, and tried to sleep for two hours throughthe midday heat.I soon realized that we had to have a clear idea of which Abwehrstations (Stellen) were involved in sending agents through Spain,and the St Albans staff were able to give me a copy of their chart,including the names of the main officers concerned. This was mostuseful, because sometimes messages referred to named officersrather than their stations. The German stations were to a greatextent independent of each other. They corresponded with Berlin,described what they were doing and sent in their agents' reports,but they had freedom to recruit agents as they liked, train them,equip them and send them off to Spain. And later, if all went well,they would act as case-officers to run their agents in the UK andexploit their contacts.

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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryWe soon had a good example of the sort of problem we would

have to solve. A letter came from Head Office with informationfrom an ISOS intercept, a radio message sent from Ast Hamburgto Abwehr Madrid, giving details of a new agent, being trainedand equipped for his spying mission in England. He was a formermember of the British Union of Fascists who had been in dangerof arrest and had fled, early in the war, to Germany, hoping toget work in anti-British propaganda. The Abwehr recruiters hadspotted him and persuaded him to try spying instead. His photo-graph and name would follow by courier.According to the Hamburg station, he had shown promise andwas almost ready for despatch to Spain en route for England. Hehad been given codes training and shown how to construct a radiotransmitter, and would be equipped with secret ink and developer,his radio crystal, a book for use in transposition coding and asecret ink document containing his main directives and a list ofBritish fascist contacts whom he might be able to contact. It hadbeen decided that it would be too risky to let him use his Britishpassport, even with false personal details and photograph, and hehad been given a 'false-false' passport2 with a real but alteredphotograph and a new name. Details of his flight to Madrid wouldfollow in about ten days' time. It was requested that he be meton arrival, and found accommodation for two days, during whichhis personal hiding-places for his ink, instructions, radio-frequencycrystal and currency should be checked and a seat booked on thefirst available flight from Lisbon to England. Hamburg had added,'This is a potentially valuable source. Grateful for thorough check-ing and encouragement.'Reading this letter I was at a loss to know what we could do.Even when we got the flight details we would have no one whocould check on arrivals from Hamburg - or would the flight beHamburg-Berlin (or Paris?)-Madrid? - nor any informant whocould help with customers checking into hotels or, later, embarkingon a train or air journey to Lisbon. And his passport photographhad been 'altered'. Perhaps he now had a beard.

Analysing the problem and the means of solving it, we came tothis conclusion:1. An Abwehr station signals the departure of a new agent. Welearn a lot about him from the ISOS intercept but we do not havehis name or sight of a photograph.

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Benton: The ISOS Years2. At a guess, the two days' stay in Madrid requested in the

Hamburg message may have had a good reason and be requestedin all cases. The Abwehr case-officers would be well aware thatonce their protege had left occupied territory and was free to gowhere he wished, he might well decide that the dangerous life ofa spy was not for him, and either inform us (which happenedoften), or try to remain in Spain or another neutral country.Therefore, an opportunity for checking his state of mind, encour-aging him and making sure that he had a clear idea of his instruc-tions and had hidden his more secret equipment according toAbwehr rules would be advisable. In fact, this is what usuallyhappened; there was a stop of a few days in Madrid.3. He would arrive in Madrid either by air direct, or by air toBarcelona and on by train, and leave for Lisbon by sleeper-trainor flight, probably not by car.4. He would be accommodated in a hotel in Madrid and pos-sibly also in Barcelona.In order to identify the spy we should need: for 3 above, pas-senger lists of flights to Madrid and Barcelona by relevant airlines,but probably Lufthansa; passenger lists for the trains, the onlyavailable being sleeper and reserved first class passenger lists; airpassenger lists for the Lisbon-Poole flights; for 4 above, we shouldtry to get at the reception desks of the main hotels.It was a tall order, but well within two years we had achievedall these requirements. We were immensely helped by the factthat the Abwehr officers were a gentlemanly organization. Theybelieved in treating their spies well, accommodated them at goodhotels and sent them on by sleeper or first class reserved seats.This meant that we could limit our enquiries, but must make astart.The ISOS traffic which we received from St Albans either bybag or coded telegram grew and grew. I soon found that I neededmore staff and this was very difficult to arrange because the Span-iards were becoming increasingly alarmed at the growing size of

both the British and German embassies; and they had imposed aban. No more staff from the UK were allowed. This meant that Ihad to try to find other people. In the end I engaged the help ofsome members of the British community. Their work consistedvery largely of checking names.Ultimately, we had a row of sixteen card cabinets and a large

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Journalof ContemporaryHistorypart of the day was taken up by five women, working side by side,who simply checked whether a new name was already on thecards; if so, an addition had to be recorded. If not, a fresh namecard was made out. I had no idea about filing and our firstextremely primitive method was to file every paper which cameinto the office, and copies of those that went out, in chronologicalorder, in large leverlock files. On the cards there would be justthe name and details of the person concerned, and the numbersof the papers on the files. This in the end drove the officer whosucceeded me frantic, and he changed the whole system, but whileit lasted, it worked out really remarkably well.It was at first only Peggie and I who could encode and decode,but later on I was given an assistant, Jack Ivens, who also had asecretary. Jack had been a businessman with Spanish connections,and spoke much better Spanish than I did. He proved an invalu-able aid and made it possible for Peggie and me to take leave inthe UK and attend a course. I had a good visa examiner and shehad her own secretary, but they, of course, had nothing to do withmy Section V work. I felt that I must make better contact inthe embassy among the different departments, and here I shouldexplain a little about the Madrid Embassy, because it wasremarkable.

Although Sir Samuel Hoare was very anxious not to fall foulof the Spaniards, as he had said, in fact he had on his staff notjust one or two intelligence service officers but several, who werein competition with each other for his favour. The MilitaryAttache, Brigadier Torr, had his own 'special source' who wouldproduce information which bypassed Head of Chancery and wentstraight to the Ambassador. The Naval Attache, Alan Hillgarth,had a whole series of 'sources' whose information, again, was onlyto be passed to the Ambassador. The Economic Counsellor hadsome and also the Blacklist Section, which had a great deal ofinformation about Spanish firmswhich were dealing with the nazis.There were all these different sources of 'intelligence' as well asmy staff and Hamilton-Stokes's.

It was a big embassy and people in almost all departments werefrom time to time very useful to me. The other great help that Ihad was from the twenty-two Consular posts, distributed rightaround the coast and also in the interior, and I think it is fair tosay that there was not one of them that was not helpful in provid-ing me with information. The most important for me were the

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Benton: The ISOS YearsConsulate General in Barcelona, the Consulate in Bilbao andthe Vice-Consulates in Santander and San Sebastian, but therewere many other contacts, even in the very small Vice-Consulatesin Jerez, Granada and Cartagena, who were useful at one time oranother. They all helped to fill the cards in our enormous index.The card index, in the course of nearly three years when I wasin charge, grew to fourteen feet in length and really appeared tohave a life of its own, because it often produced information thatwe did not know it had. Into that card index went the names ofvisa applicants, lists of ship passengers, names of known agents,Abwehr officers, guests at hotels, passengers on air flights, pas-sengers on trains, as well as individuals about whom we hadreceived information from Head Office or locally.Through friends in the Consulate General in Barcelona and inother places, we recruited head agents who in turn could hireinformants to obtain lists of passengers on the Lufthansa flights,lists of persons staying at certain hotels and sleeper and first class'reserved' passengers between Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao andLisbon. We were able to obtain flight passenger lists through anagent in the airport. Then we found that in Barcelona the Abwehralmost always used the Hotel Palace and all we had to discoverwas the list of people arriving there on the date in question.Sometimes we had the bill for the whole exercise and, knowinghow much it cost to put people up at the Hotel Palace in Barce-lona, we could check that this in fact was the hotel chosen, andlook at the guest list. Sometimes it was then obvious, owing to thesize of the sum of money quoted, that the man was going to besent on to Bilbao, on his way to spy in the USA. He would embarkon one of the two great Spanish liners that crossed the Atlantic,the Cabo de Hornos and the Cabo de Buena Esperanza.When, by comparing the flight passenger list, the hotel list andthe train list, we found that there was one name that appeared onall three, on the right dates, we knew for certain that this was theagent we were trying to spot. Through the active collaboration ofthe Consulate in Bilbao, we could obtain a copy of the passengerlist of either ship, so that we could identify the one on which theagent was embarking, and even his cabin number. This was oftremendous importance because there was no question of contact-ing the man, and perhaps trying to turn him, in Spain. We weretempted sometimes, when we knew for certain who an agent was,to telephone him at his hotel in Barcelona and tell him we knew

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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryperfectly well that he was a German spy, and that if he wished toavoid very serious trouble he should tell his German controlnothing but come and see us at the Passport Control Office whenhe was passing through Madrid.But that would have been too risky. What if the man decidedto say, 'No, I am damned if I'm going to do this to my Germancontrol; he's treated me very well. I'm going to tell him at oncethat I am blown to the British, that this is the offer I've had fromthem, and that we must cancel the whole project.' That wouldhave made the Germans wonder how we could have known somuch. They would have begun to suspect that we were decodingtheir telegrams, and the fat would have been in the fire.What we could depend on was our limited control of the seas.The Spaniards had had to agree that their two transatlantic liners,on their way to the United States, must call at Bermuda forchecking. The passengers were interviewed and any Germannationals were taken off. This gave us a wonderful opportunitywhen we knew that an agent was on this boat and his cabinnumber. We alerted the Bermuda police through St Albans. Whenthe liner reached Bermuda, while the passenger himself was beinginterviewed, his cabin would be searched by the police with a fine-tooth comb. And they were experts. The Abwehr trainers couldhave taught nothing to the Bermuda police about hiding-placeson a steamship. The covers of lifeboats, lavatory cisterns, berthcushions and sophisticated caches like the double linings of suit-cases were all old hat to them. Somewhere the spy was bound tohave hidden his instructions, his secret ink and its developer, hisbrief, some form of reciphering pad that he could use with codes,and finally, of course, his wireless transmitter, or, if he had not yetgot one, the vital crystal which would determine the wavelengthon which he was to operate.Sometimes the instructions were in secret ink and the ink itselfand its developer were hidden in some piece of toiletry, like a tinof talcum powder. But in many cases the Abwehr used micro-photography (which the Germans had developed, very cleverly).There were two forms of micro-photographic reduction. It couldbe to the size of a postage stamp, which was stuck onto an envelopeand covered with a real stamp. We did not know this until one'walk-in' agent in Madrid picked an envelope from his pocket,with a cancelled stamp on it, and told us that underneath it werehis instructions. We got a kettle and steamed it off and there, true

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Benton: The ISOS Yearsenough, in tiny lettering, were the man's detailed instructionsabout what he had to do when he got to England, and othernotes about coding, the use of secret inks and so on.We got used to this device and the people at Bermuda knewthat there was always a chance, if an envelope had stamps on it,of finding hidden messages. So they would put it under a UV lampor find some other way of seeing if there was a message under-neath. But then the Germans had an even more clever method,and this was to reduce the message much smaller. They had founda way in which a sheet of instructions as big as A4 size could bephotographed and then reduced and reduced until it was the sizeof a pinhead.These were extremely easy to conceal. One agent whom I inter-viewed in Madrid showed me that his case-officer's instructionsand notes were always in the full stop which followed the date ina letter. He had several completely harmless-looking letters deal-ing with insurance or his family, and the full stops after the dateswere in fact the micro-dots. To read them he would need a power-ful microscope. We found an agent who was sent off by one ofthe rather more naive Abwehr officers and actually carried a verylarge microscope in his luggage on the way to England, but Iexpect that the usual method was for the agent to borrow amicroscope, transcribe what the micro-dot contained, and returnthe microscope to the shop.The first time I saw a micro-dot was on an Irish 'walk-in', againa case of someone who had been caught up by the war and whohad boasted how he hated the British, and was recruited by theAbwehr, trained for six months and prepared for his mission inEngland. As soon as he arrived in Madrid, he turned up in myoffice, pulled out his tie, turned it inside out, pointed to a bit ofwax stuck on the back and said, 'Those are my instructions. That'smy micro-dot.'On the Cabo de Buena Esperanza we recruited a steward whohad a hiding-place above his bar. Part of the ceiling slid back toreveal a big space. He used to be contacted by German agentswhen they boarded the ship and they gave him their wireless setsto hide there so that they got through the control.If an agent was discovered at Bermuda and was hoping to goon to the States, he would be taken off the ship, interrogated, andthen handed over in due course to the Americans. Sometimes thejourney was broken at Bermuda and the passengers went on to

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Journalof ContemporaryHistoryCaribbean countries or Mexico, but most of them went on to theUnited States.The agents we used, in airports, railway stations, sleeping-cars,hotels and the Spanish liners were not easy to come by. A greatdeal of the credit should go to the British subjects in the Embassyand Consular posts who went to great lengths to help us. Theydid not know about ISOS, but they accepted that we had sourceswho provided sometimes remarkably accurate information. Aclerk in the Bilbao Consulate, who had lived in the area for manyyears, was on friendly terms with someone in the shipping officewho could supply passenger lists. The excuse could be that ajournalist friend wanted to know if a certain person was travellingon the ship. Money might change hands, but Spaniards would doa great deal for a friendly evening with the cards and a certainamount of drink. 'Lloyds' was another excuse. 'It's needed for theShipping List people.' And so on.Jack Ivens and I recruited many informants ourselves but,usually, to start with, on behalf of a national London newspaper,or Lloyds List or a jealous wife, or even Interpol. Once a contacthad shown willingness to be helpful, one could proceed in a moreopen manner and finally raise the question of a reward. WithBritish subjects it was much easier. Many of those who wereworking in Spain during the war had a guilty feeling about beingsafe and well-fed when their relatives were suffering hardship inBritain, and we could openly tell them that we were working forintelligence. In most cases they did not shy away and were ofteneager to do something to help. But still, of course, no mention ofISOS. When we began work in Madrid, we assumed that both theSpanish and the Germans would be watching us constantly, andevery time I went out to make a contact I drove fast and withseveral turnings for the first mile or so until I could be certainthat I was not being followed. It was not difficult, because therewere not so many cars on the Spanish roads in those days.When, as occasionally happened, people actually approachedEmbassy staff and offered specialist information which theythought would help our war effort, we had to be very cautiousabout accepting their help, because we were always afraid, in theearly days, that either the Spanish Secret Police or the Germansmight be trying to trap us into a situation which could be exploited.It was only later that we learned from ISOS material and fromthe enquiries of another of our agents, that neither the Germans

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Benton: The ISOS Yearsnor the Spaniards were actively spying on our activities. If theAbwehr had designs on us there would certainly have been men-tion in their correspondence with Berlin, and there was none.Nevertheless, during the first year I never contacted a new sourcewhere we could be observed or overheard, and always bore inmind that my informant, however genuine-seeming, might be adouble-crosser. Sometimes we were given very little information,owing to gaps in ISOS traffic or corruption in transmission, andthere was one case that earned from Philby a laconic comment'Good arithmetic!'.

The first we had heard of Abwehr agent DANTE was a requestfrom Abwehr Madrid to their Hamburg colleagues for a large sumin pesetas 'for DANTE's rail fare' to be credited to their account.The sum was far too large for the journey from Madrid to eitherBilbao or Lisbon, so we guessed that Madrid had sent Hamburga rail ticket for DANTE's travel from Barcelona to Madrid. Butit could have been by day, with a reserved first class seat, or bysleeper. The onward journey to Bilbao or Lisbon would probablyhave been by sleeper. If the tickets had been bought by theGerman Embassy there would have been a diplomatic discountof 10 per cent and another 5 per cent if the journey was mid-week. There were therefore a dozen ways in which the sum couldhave been reached. We worked them out and one sum was exactlyright. DANTE had travelled by day to Madrid and on by sleeperto Lisbon, where he was identified.

Ralph Jarvis was getting hotel lists and those of the England-bound flying boats and had surveillance teams to check on thecontacts of known agents during their stay in Lisbon, so togetherwe were getting near total coverage of Abwehr agents transitingthe Peninsula en route to Britain and the USA.There was one case which has become rather famous, and ismentioned in various books, but it was of no real importance asfar as the war was concerned. The Spanish Press Attache inLondon, Angel Alcazar de Velasco, was known to be an agent ofthe Germans and the Japanese. Abwehr Madrid was forwardingreports from his British sources to Berlin. But when he returnedto Madrid on long leave this correspondence still continued, andwe could not work out who his agents in England were or howthey transmitted reports to Madrid. I was asked to try to find outwhat was happening.We had by this time a number of people who could keep a

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Journalof ContemporaryHistorywatch on suspects, and we soon found that Alcazar had a clerkwho hated him and when the worse for drink would bitterlycomplain of his bad treatment. He also hinted that he knew thingsthat would cause great trouble to Alcazar if he revealed them. Ittook a little time to develop a contact with the clerk, but I wasthen able to get to him directly. He was told I was British and thismade him quite eager to meet me. He smelled money. I made anappointment and told him that Alcazar was playing a dangerousgame. He was spying for the Germans, and if the Spanish SecretPolice discovered this - and it would be easy for me to warn them- Alcazar, and by association anyone in his employ, would be inserious trouble.Whether or not he believed this rather unlikely story, the clerklooked frightened, and I asked him if he had the keys to Alcazar'ssafe. He said no, but he would have the keys when Alcazar wenton a fortnight's holiday to Mallorca the following week. I toldhim he could earn a lot of money by allowing us to borrow thecontents of the safe for a few days. They would be returned inexactly the same order as before. There was a good deal of bicker-ing, but in the end he offered to do what we wanted for ?2,000.This seemed to me a ridiculous sum, since I had never paid morethan about ?100 for information, but I reported the offer to StAlbans - and was told to accept it.By this time, Kim Philby had been put in charge of the Iberiandesk in Section V and was therefore my boss. Some time after-wards I asked him why on earth he had agreed to the payment ofsuch an extravagant sum for what might have proved worthless.(In these days the amount would be equal to at least ?50,000.) Hesaid that Finance Department had raised their hands in horror atthe idea, but he had pointed out that a single broadside from abattleship would have cost more, and they had to agree. (It was,of course, a false comparison; the Admiralty's budget was infinitelygreater than ours.) I let the clerk know that he would be paidwhat the loot was worth, but that the sum he had mentioned wasnot impossible, and he agreed.

On the night in question I met him outside Madrid. As always,I was afraid that the man might be a stooge for the Spanish SecretPolice, and waited until he had walked some distance from his carbefore I would speak to him. I showed him that I had an automaticin my hand, and when we were both sitting in my Buick I stillkept the gun visible. I was reassured, however, by the abject state

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Benton: The ISOS Yearsof fright the clerk was suffering. He handed over a large suitcaseand I gave him ?1,000 in sterling notes, saying he would have therest if it proved worthwhile. He blustered, but I was not going togive him any more. He was a horrible little man. And, in fact,when I met him again four days later, I handed back the suitcase,with the papers and account books in the same order as before,but no more money, saying that he had been lucky to get what hehad received for such worthless stuff. He was very unpleasant, buttoo scared to linger. All he wanted to do was get the papers backin the safe and stash the money.What I had told him was quite true. We had copied all thepapers and accounts and it was quite clear that Alcazar had madeno payments to agents and that his sources were British andAmerican technical magazines. Cuttings from some magazineswere actually pinned to copies of the reports sent to the Abwehrand the Japanese.

Unwanted TasksRelations between Hamilton-Stokes and Basil Fenwick becamevery bad indeed, to the point that Hamilton-Stokes wrote a fierceletter to the Chief, complaining about Fenwick's mishandling ofhis job. But he remained. My only dealings with him were aboutleave and allowances, and in these matters he was reasonableenough. One result of this lack of co-operation was that he beganto ask me to do things he thought Hamilton-Stokes would cavil at.The first task was a singularly useless exercise. We were toldthat there was a danger that Hitler would decide to invade andoccupy Spain. It was therefore necessary for us to recruit stay-behind agents who would be able to report by radio on develop-ments such as Spanish resistance, and so forth. We were not asked,for the time being, to find suitable stay-behind men, but only tocache six of the specially-made transmitter-receivers.These Mark 1 sets were hefty things, because they had accumu-lators in them and were about the size of a small fat suitcase, andvery heavy, and the whole idea was that they should be hidden inplaces where they could not possibly be found except by theperson who was informed of their exact whereabouts. I consulteda friend who was the manager of a British firm. We stashed one,I remember, on a Sunday in a remote warehouse where there was

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Journalof ContemporaryHistorya washbasin in a concrete sink. We brought bricks and mortar,enclosed the front of the sink with a new wall and put the setinside. Anybody who would need to use it would have to breakthrough the brick wall. That was one set. Another went somewherein the garden of one of the small Vice-Consulates. Another washidden in a shed in a forest where there was a great deal of woodstrewn about and we thought we would get away with it by digginga hole under a pile of wood and lining it with rubber sheeting.The shed itself was not used at all, so there was a good chancethat the set would escape detection.What we did not know, and only learned later, was that thewhole idea was useless, because if you leave one of these accumu-lator sets for more than a month or so, the water which is chemi-cally formed inside will rust up everything, and in fact within sixmonths all those six sets would have been utterly useless for anypurpose at all.

The next job was also to expose bad planning. Fenwick wrote tosay that SOE needed clothing of Spanish origin for agents to bedropped into the south of France. As I recall, he put it: 'Weshould like you to procure eleven suits, accompanying shirts andunderclothing, and boots, all of Spanish manufacture, suitable forthe man in a small way. Measurements are in the accompanyingenvelope.'I discussed this requirement with one of our Madrid agents, aBritish businessman. He asked what was meant by 'the man ina small way' and I said I supposed a clerk or skilled workman,likely to have clothes made from second-class material. He saidhe knew a cheap tailor who could be paid to keep his mouth shut.Two days later we met in a bar.My informant said, 'Those measurements can't be right.''Why?''He asked me if the clothes were for a circus and he was grinninglike a Cheshire cat. He said that if they were for people they

would have to be very short, with 46-inch chests and arms thatreached down to their knees.''Tell him to stop working, for God's sake. I'll get the measurementschecked.'Fenwick apologized and sent new measurements by radio, and theclothes were made.

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Benton: TheISOS YearsBut my agent was worried. 'If my man tells his drinking pals

he's been asked by the British for spare clothing suitable forgorillas the story could spread. So I've told him they are clothesfor anti-Franco prisoners who have escaped. He's rabidly againstthe government so I think he'll stay mum.'But it was worrying. A slip like this, in a matter which hadnothing to do with my Section V mission, could land us all introuble.

I have a rather vague memory of having been asked, probablylate in 1941, by Section V, for the telephone number of my flat,on the grounds that it might be necessary for an escaping agentwhen passing through Madrid.A double agent, CELERY, formerly an RAF officer, notionallycashiered for malpractice, was working with the famous agentSNOW, Arthur George Owens, known to the Abwehr as Johnny.SNOW had been active for M15 since before the war as a doubleagent in touch with Major Ritter, alias Dr Rantzau, a Luftwaffeofficer on the staff of Abwehr Hamburg. Ritter was having doubtsabout SNOW's genuineness as an Abwehr spy, and SNOW, on hiscase-officer's orders, aimed to clear his name by providing Ritterwith a valuable new source, CELERY, whom he introduced tohim in Lisbon as John Brown. Although Ritter was still verydoubtful about SNOW, he was so impressed by the perfectly genu-ine information which CELERY gave him at this first meetingthat he asked him to stay as his guest in Hamburg for a few weeksso that he could be debriefed at length. CELERY, as instructedby his case-officer, agreed. During his time in Hamburg he wasfollowed everywhere and his possessions secretly searched, but noevidence was found that he was not what he said he was, a poten-tial spy for the Abwehr.So far this story seems to be accurate; what follows comes fromLadislas Farrago's book, The Game of the Foxes, and appears byhis account to come from his conversations after the war withMajor Ritter.On the last night of his stay in Hamburg there was a goodbyedinner, during which Ritter's wife noticed that CELERY carrieda signet ring which had a hinged lid, and alerted her husband.CELERY was drinking heavily and Ritter took him on to anothertavern and filled him up first with brandy and then with a Mickey

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Journal of ContemporaryHistoryFinn. CELERY passed out, his ring was seized and taken to theHamburg Abwehr, where it was found that behind the lid was atiny photograph of a girl, on the back of which, in secret ink, weresome numbers, apparently in code, and an address in a Spanishtown (i.e. 38 Calle Velasquez).According to Farrago, the ring was returned to the sleepingCELERY, who was allowed to leave Hamburg next day.This seemsto me extremely unlikely; if CELERY had any secret message onhim it was surely reason for a full interrogation. But Farrago goeson to write that the Abwehr experts could not understand thesecret writing code. In fact, they gave the address and telephonenumber of my house in Madrid. CELERY was escorted in theLisbon plane, but at a stop-over in Madrid he went into a lavatoryand was not seen again. It was later concluded that he had slippedout, telephoned me and been met and smuggled out to Gibraltarwithout delay.I have no recollection that this happened. Ritter might have hadaccess to Farrago's captured Abwehr documents and have knownmy name and address, and just invented their inclusion in thesignet ring and the story about CELERY's escape. Incidentally, ahinged signet ring is the last place to hide anything, because it issuch an obvious cache. There is one good reason for my scepticism.At the time in question we were still living in hotels, not in ahouse, and I therefore had no private telephone.

One rather odd requirement was due to the mention in ISOSmaterial of Abwehr contacts in various parts of Spain, who werereferred to by name. We could not understand what their functionwas, but it may have been in connection with some plan, perhapsstill at the drafting stage, for the Wehrmacht to invade Spain. Wetried to trace the agents' names through our regional contacts, butfound no evidence of any activity worth reporting.

We felt the need for a surveillance team in Madrid, and especiallyfor making sure that 'walk-in' agents did not double-cross us. Wewere still wondering how we could cope with this requirementwhen we had a windfall. Through a contact in the Embassy whohad to deal with escaped French soldiers and airmen, we learnedof a gang of six criminals from Marseilles who, on the run from

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Benton: The ISOS Yearsthe French police, had seized a car and crossed into Spain - sothey told us later - by giving the Hitler salute and charging throughthe controls. In any case, here they were, in Madrid, and apparentlylooking for outlets for their various skills. They also said that theywished to go to England and join de Gaulle's Free French units.They were told that they would have to speak to my officeabout the question of visas, and their leader, a man we nicknamedSHIFTY, was interviewed by Peggie. She suggested that he andhis men would do well to show their enthusiasm for the Alliedcause by doing some work in Madrid for the British Embassy.They would be paid.During the winter of 1940/1, before we came to Madrid, we hadattended a short course in personal security and surveillance, andPeggie and I decided to train SHIFTY and his men as a surveil-lance team. They accepted our offer with alacrity and underwentinstruction from Peggie very happily. They formed an affectionfor my wife because she knew Marseilles well, having lived for ayear at Sanary shortly after her divorce, and she understood theirhorrible Marseillaise patois.The team was used quite frequently for checking the movementsof 'walk-ins' and others, and also as a back-up if we had tointerview someone who might be a cover for a hijack operation.There was only one occasion when they slipped up, and disas-trously.It must have been in the summer of 1943, when some werebeginning to see how the war might end, that a member of theGerman Embassy (not an Abwehr officer) put out a tentativefeeler for a contact with our Press Section, who passed him on tome. I arranged a meeting at night near a farmhouse a few milesfrom Madrid and told Head Office as a matter of routine. To mysurprise, for by this time we were not much afraid of hijacking,they insisted that we should have the meeting under observationby SHIFTY's gang. We deployed the men well before the timefor the meeting and the German's car arrived on time. He wasalone and obviously very nervous. I had begun to question himwhen one of SHIFTY's men, who thought he had been placed inthe wrong position, suddenly leapt to his feet and gallopedacross the scene, passing close by me and the astounded German,who screamed in terror and ran for his car. We heard no morefrom him. Peggie scolded SHIFTY, but her

Documents

Kenneth Benton, The ISOS years Madrid 1941-3