THE CHURCHILL INTERVIEW: Author Nigel West

well good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the national churchill library and center my name is michael bishop and i'm the director of the library an executive director of the international churchill society the society was founded fifty years ago and is dedicated to preserving and promoting the historic legacy of Winston Churchill through publications and events such as our recent 35th international Churchill conference in Colonial Williamsburg to learn more about Churchill in the society please visit Winston Churchill org the library is the result of a partnership between the University and the Society and over the last two years we've welcomed many students and visitors and shared with them access to primary documents books and exhibits about the great man and I hope you'll take some time to enjoy our exhibits including a painting by Churchill over there for our Churchill conversations series and this is the last one of the semester we've recently welcomed to the library ambassador Ron Dermer philanthropist David Rubenstein and distinguished historians including Anthony beaver and Andrew Roberts to discuss not only the particulars of Churchill's life and career but their application to our present-day challenges first Churchill himself observed the longer you can look back the farther you can look forward but now let's turn to the main event we're very pleased to welcome Nigel West here tonight Nigel West is the pen name I almost said code name of Rupert Allison who served as the Member of Parliament for Torbay from 1987 to 1997 his many books include mi5 the true story of the most secret counter espionage organization in the world Venona the greatest secret of the Cold War and the Faber book of espionage mr. West survived or rather was educated at a Roman Catholic monastery and London University tonight he'll discuss his new book Churchill's spy files already praised by the CIA's own historian is a unique and valuable contribution to world war ii espionage history and the literature of intelligence ladies and gentlemen please welcome Nigel West Nigel more than more than most prime ministers and indeed more than most world leaders Churchill was endlessly fascinated by the secret world can you can you tell us about that fascination and how it manifested itself well I've always first of all thank you very much indeed for inviting me to address you a great honor I've always bought into that idea that Churchill was preoccupied with intelligence had a greater deeper understanding of intelligence collection methods of the sources involved of how these sources should be exploited I always believed that but when I came to write this book I found something really very different because the particular file that I found at Kew in the public archives hadn't been touched so had not been digitalized the documents were all in higgledy-piggledy order but right at the top was the correspondence but related to how churchill came to receive these briefings from the security service unlike you I had always believed that Churchill had really been preoccupied with intelligence operations but the truth is that all of this started apparently in a conversation on a Sunday afternoon between Duff Cooper and the prime minister and it went something along these lines which I I found in the archive which was Churchill to Duff on a Sunday afternoon hello Duff what are you up to these days Duff Cooper says hello Prime Minister I'm your Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster long silence and Churchill says yes Duff but what do you actually do and Duff said well I'm the minister in the war cabinet in charge of mi5 long silence Churchill to Duff again says what is mi5 do and that is how Duff Cooper subsequently went to the director service and said I really think we need to brief the Prime Minister on what mi5 does and the reaction in the files when you look at the arguments mi5 said we're not terribly keen to tell the Prime Minister what we do partly because he's so fabulously indiscreet and we know that he's not really very good at keeping secrets and secondly were really very anxious that if we brief him or what we really are doing he'll boast about it to Herbert Morrison Herbert Morrison was the Labour Home Secretary who theoretically was the cabinet minister with departmental responsibility for the security service it was only during the war that Duff Cooper became the second minister in charge of mi5 and Herbert Morrison it was thought because of his Labour Party background probably knew half the suspects in the Communist Party who were the subject of surveillance by mi5 and the mi5 really didn't want Churchill saying over a jolly dinner to Herbert Morrison guess what I read this afternoon about your pals so the the proposition that Churchill was preoccupied with intelligence operations I sort of had to come to a slightly different assessment although I concede in secret intelligence from overseas he had some 2,000 meetings with Stewart Mingus during the Second World War and there is no doubt that he was very interested in ultra material and he was very interested in secret sources so was it a measure of the extreme secrecy of mi5 which I had never really realized before when I read your book I was thinking of our National Security Agency which used to be jokingly referred to as no such agency and it seemed I mean you can literally read in this book that a few figures in mi5 said I don't think we want to talk to the Prime Minister about what we actually do was it that well but let me give you a couple of examples of what the security service did at that time they first of all relied very heavily on intercepts so they were reading the hand ciphers codenamed ISOs and the machine ciphers originated generator on the Enigma machine called disk is K so s candy sauce became known to the prime minister and it would have been just one word out of place would have compromised both sources he was very interested in the double agents and in these mi5 briefings there are references to I should say probably 50 wartime double agents a couple of whom were let's say in contact with his social circle so the opportunity for indiscretion there was absolutely gigantic there was then a very secret sauce called special material and this was the telephone intercepts on all the neutral diplomatic missions in London so the Turkish ambassador's private conversations with his mistress in Belgrave Square became known to the security service through these intercepts and that was referred to a special material and then finally and arguably the most sensitive and embarrassing which remains in operation to this day was xxx and xxx the source known as X X X was the compromising of diplomatic pouches how did this happen a diplomatic courier would walk out of the Swedish embassy in London travel to Hull to get on the plane to Stockholm to deliver secret documents the communications from the Swedish ambassador in London to his Minister in Stockholm well how did the British get access to that sealed pouch that was in the possession supposedly of the courier all the time and the answer is that when depend upon the sexual preferences of the courier when he got on the train that Kings Cross to travel up to two how if he was straight the most gorgeous beautiful blonde girl pouting girl would be in his reserved compartment and there would be a lot of rumpy-pumpy before they got to Hull and then when they got to hold the aircraft would be delayed and there would be more rumpy-pumpy and the the content of the pouch would be compromised and if the if the individual the courier was gay that would already have been assessed by mi5 and there would be a young man a delightful young man called Jack Hewitt who was Anthony blunts boyfriend who would make himself available for war work on the way up to home and there would be when the plane was delayed and of course all of that had been set up the the pouch would be examined by a team of 25 mi5 and sis technicians who probably for all I know is still there at Hull Airport and they would unpick the seams of the pouch and copy the documents this is a this is a grotesque breach of diplomatic protocol and for all I know carries on to this day hmm so tell us about the mechanics of the presentation of these reports to the prime minister were they really for his eyes only well you touch on a very raw subject because when I discovered the files and put them back together and then filled in the redactions I was very keen on trying to establish exactly the circumstances in which they were presented to the Prime Minister and on the top of each report there were 25 in all it says personal for the Prime Minister only well I thought that's a terrific book title and when I was trying to sell my book to buy publisher that was the title of the book the marketing department of course came straight back and said that's an impossible title it's completely inappropriate the algorithms of Google search engine which we all live by apparently will not allow you to use that title and so that's why it's got this rather lame title which I'm embarrassed Churchill Spy files so it's got to have the name of Churchill in the title and it's got to have the word spy who knew hmm so it's Google's world Redis live in it apparently so I think that Jeff business has got a lot to answer for that particularly the answer the cover of my book but but my point is this that the reason why it was called on every paper why there was a title for the Prime Minister only was precisely that that the Director General of the security service once once a month would go to the Prime Minister wherever he was deliver a three-page document double-spaced and then wait there while the Prime Minister read it the Prime Minister could not keep a copy had to hand the three pages back to the Director General the Security Service the security director general would then answer any questions that arose and the Prime Minister obviously from the file you can see had a lot of questions and ordered special reports on particular subjects which I hope you'll ask me about and then the Prime Minister having handed the documents back the the director-general would take them back to the Security Service where no copy was kept so the documents that I was dealing with of the originals I mean they had the Prime Minister's annotations in his characteristic red ink right across them with WSC underneath and so they were genuinely for the Prime Minister only and that's why there are no copies in the Prem files at Kew which you would normally expect the Prime Minister's papers are usually pretty comprehensive and you would expect to find these documents there there are none in exactly the same way you would expect copies to be taken by the Cabinet or and by the Prime Minister's private secretary nothing in the Cabinet Office files in the cab files @q either so these papers only exist in the mi5 archives hmm you mentioned a few minutes ago Anthony blunt one of the the infamous Cambridge five and it's the height of irony that these reports from a myth mi5 to the Prime Minister were I believe edited by blunt could you tell us a little bit about the consequences of putting a Soviet spy in charge of editing the mi5 reports that were being given to the prime minister well you say they're an irony in it and there's a terrible sadness as well because and I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the correspondence leading up to Duff Cooper talking to Sir David Petrie who was the director general and trying to persuade mi5 that this was a shrewd thing to do to indoctrinate the Prime Minister into these very secret programs there is a been a discussion within the file between Sir David Petrie who says well I'll see what I can do to Duff Cooper then he goes to his director of counter espionage guy little who was really the long-term institutional memory of the security service and he decides that on balance it is a good idea for the security service to have the ear of the Prime Minister mainly I think in case anything went wrong he felt that there would be some leverage with the Prime Minister but guy little in June 1940 had hired as his personal assistant Anthony Blunt I mean of course guy little had no idea that Anthony Blunt at that time was a fully fledged member of not just CP GB but of the Soviet intelligence service the NKVD and Antony blunt told me himself that he on a weekly basis was having secret meetings with an NKVD contact from the Soviet embassy and one stage he used to take out real original documents from mi5 s headquarters in sand James's Street and taped them to the Soviets who would then copy them and then give them back the following day so that he could take them back into the office but he stopped doing that because he was once detained by a police officer in Hyde Park who asked his look in his briefcase saw all these secret documents but didn't know what they were and gave them back to Anthony blunt and explained that he was investigating burglaries in the area but that's so frightened blunt that he stopped taking documents out of the building he had an extraordinary memory and he would memorize documents particularly the intercept flimsy switcher of course were enormous value to the Soviets but the point is this the guy little wanted somebody that he trusted with a great good intellect and the ability to write cogently to prepare these documents and so Anthony blunt was given the task of compiling and editing these individual reports 25 of them and here's the sadness that with that prime minister's authority endorsed by guy little Anthony Blunt went to every single really secret section of mi5 and demanded to know what they were doing demanded their techniques wanted accessed wanted to know the sources to identify the individual identities not just of all the double agents but for example there was some correspondence where he wrote a letter to the head of a section that dealt with the domestic staff who were hired by neutral embassies in London so if you wanted a cleaner or a butler or Vallot or a doorkeeper at let's say the Portuguese Embassy in London there was a particular servants agency in Mayfair that supplied these staff and of course that organization was sponsored by mi5 all the people who worked in these embassies were mi5 agents and they had only agreed to work and maybe put their lives at risk on condition that mi5 took reasonable steps to protect their identity and in the KGB archives many years ago when I was working there I found a tragic letter from the head of the section dealing with these domestic staff saying we have never before been asked to put all of these identities on one sheet of paper and disclose them to anybody outside the section so I presume I have your undertaking that you will destroy this document as soon as it is of use to you and I found that document in Moscow so that demonstrates I hadn't understood at that time that this was what Blount was engaged in on behalf of the Prime Minister there wasn't a section within mi5 that he didn't have the authority to go and say I am here with the full authority of Number ten you have to disclose all your secrets to me and this is within an organization where compartmentalization is valued where the whole point is need-to-know and you don't go and ask other colleagues what they're doing it's extraordinary one of the things that emerges from this book is that even though we are accustomed to thinking of mi5 as the domestic security service in mi6 is the foreign foreign intelligence service mi5 s scope or purview was it was actually quite international in scope in many ways could you comment yes this is my advice to the audience if you read a book that says that mi5 s responsibilities ended at the 5 mile limit Chuck the book away the security service at once and it's interwar period was called the Imperial Security Intelligence Service and the reason was that every two years it sponsored a security conference in London and invited the head of Special Branch from every single one of the police forces within the British Empire and the British Empire at that time was was pretty damn impressive so the chief of police in Fiji would show up and would be rubbing shoulders with the head of Special Branch from Nairobi and there would be a defence security officer which was the cover for the mi5 officer in Trinidad in Jamaica in Bermuda right across the world there would be a DSO in Malta in Gibraltar in Cyprus a very large security intelligence Middle East organization based in Cairo which covered the whole of Iran Iraq Syria Libya and the Lebanon not to mention Security Intelligence Far East which was based in Hong Kong and Singapore so mi5 was actually a global organization which had either a DSO defence security officer or an SLO security liaison officer right across the globe South Africa you name it wherever there was a British defensive interest mi5 was the organisation responsible and the division of labour was that sis or mi6 collected intelligence in foreign countries so if you were to go to Switzerland or to France or Belgium or China there would be an sis representative rather than an mi5 representative and they're big a sub-branch by the way whereas the deai be a brilliant intelligence agency that very few people have read about or studied which started in 1883 staffed by British personnel till 1947 and that was the Delhi Intelligence Bureau arguably the best and probably the best intelligence agency in the world never been penetrated by any hostile adversary within the scope of your book tell us about the relationship between mi5 and mi6 was it marked more by rivalry or cooperation well again I think there's a lot of Mythology about the the difference between five and six and what I've tried to explain is that the security service was not fully staffed by law enforcement an adjunct of Metropolitan Police Special Branch that a substantial number of the staff of the security service indeed had a background in the Delhi Intelligence Bureau they had been Indian policemen and external observers and writers who should have known better have tried to claim that the Secret Intelligence Service were disparaging about mi5 calling them retired Indian policemen but the truth is that the deputy head of the Secret Intelligence Service Valentine Vivian was himself a former member of the d ib and a former police officer in india and felix Cowgill who was there the head of section five of the Secret Intelligence Service had his background in India and the truth is that the d ib was a brilliant organisation that effectively ran india in many respects 300 young british officers who had agents in in every mutiny in every demonstration in every strike in every protest in every market in every village in india and the the collection of intelligence if you could learn how to do that in india then being able to do it anywhere else in the world was easy in your book you you caution against the sort of Reese and not really recent but the the the trend of of denigrating the German intelligence service during the war saying they really didn't know what they were doing and you you you know you make the case that they were certainly better than that that popular misconception would suggest but in your book it seems apparent that they were prone to many follies and mistakes and the British security services were very effective rolling up most of the German spies so is it is it more a matter of German ineptitude or British superiority do you think well the great advantage that was exploited by the British was access to German communications I mean first of all the hand ciphers that were used by the Germans right across Western Europe that that system was broken quite easily by the radio security service in England and that led to a compromise of many of the machine generated systems particularly the Enigma channels that were used by the up there so to be able to read the internal communications of the enemy which relied very heavily on wireless communication and that was part of the role of the French Resistance and similar organizations across Western Europe was to destroy German confidence in landline communications which couldn't be intercepted so as so you blew up a cut down the telegraph poles blew up the telephone exchanges so as to force the Germans onto you the use of radio which could be intercepted and so that was enormous ly helpful to the British because we were able to exploit that on the other hand it is worth saying that the Germans we now know were very interested in signals intelligence understood that enigma had a limited shelf life knew that it was potentially insecure the Germans themselves employed about 60,000 people on signals intelligence during the second world war broke the swiss army's enigma system so they knew enigma was vulnerable but they relied on other very sophisticated online teletype encrypted systems such as geheime schreiber and they used one-time pads there's the so called Pandoran and Floradora systems the germans also had limited opportunities to infiltrate spies into england because of the English Channel so when you look at the German intelligence organisations particularly in Spain and Portugal this was the highway for infiltrating agents into England and these are pretty impressive organisations when of 300 of their case officers operating in Madrid for example 300 they had a hundred and forty vehicles that they drove around Spain in they had 17 substations right across Spain directing agents towards England the staff at the Krieg's organization as it was called in Madrid when you look at the individual background of these case officers they were all absolutely fluent in Spanish they had long backgrounds of contact with the nationalist forces in Spain mainly because they had acted in some kind of liaison capacity during the Spanish Civil War as members of the Condor Legion which was the German contribution to the nationalist side these people were impressive many of them had long business careers in spanish-speaking countries in South America and Central America so they were sophisticated they were generally between the ages of about 28 and 58 quite a large proportion of them had Jewish backgrounds they were not enthusiastic about going back to Germany for obvious reasons and and did a pretty good job working for German Intel in Madrid and that if you look at the activity of the Kriegsmarine in Madrid sorry the Krieg's organisation in Madrid and Lisbon it's altogether really pretty impressive and they infiltrated a lot of agents into the UK either through Gibraltar all through Trinidad all through Bermuda or sometimes direct from Lisbon by air or by sea straight to the United Kingdom one is struck reading your book at the number of redactions that still appear 3/4 of a century after these reports were first given to the prime minister I wonder could you could you comment on those redactions the the culture of secrecy and and in a general sense how has that affected your work as an intelligence historian well redactions of a redaction is the deal if I can't get access to a secret document unless it's got redactions I'm happy to comply with that the truth is that after you've been in this game for long enough and you know the names and the lengths of the names you can you can work out a lot of the redaction so I've put them a lot of them back in again don't tell anybody but I've I've restored a lot of the redactions and the redactions are there for a purpose first of all to protect individuals so there are the names of people's individual sources who supplied information to Her Majesty's Government and they were promised lifelong confidentiality and the view is that they and their offspring are entitled to that same protection the reality is that it's the offspring who come to me to say what did my father do in the war what it might grandfather do in the war I know he did something really interesting and really secret and I only wish he'd told us but he didn't and so those redactions are there for a purpose I try and restore them where I can and occasionally you find that the people who made the redactions aren't really qualified to do so within the security service now that the number of people working on historical documents and the declassification process sort of don't really have the institutional memory to understand what is really secret and what is not ladies and gentlemen I think I'll open it up now to questions from the audience we have a microphone that Aaron is carrying there and I'm sure you have lots of questions for Nigel so please raise your hand and we'll send the microphone in your direction this gentleman here in the front I wanted to give you an opportunity to address the special reports the the prime minister commissioned that you had referenced early in in the talk well these these are special reports that the prime minister requested based on slightly obscure references within the original documents so the first one that I would draw your attention to is a really fascinating case which doesn't appear anywhere else in the in the official history or anywhere else this was an AB fair officer called Richard vermin spelled w HR ma double n now he was arrested just outside Algiers in November 1942 turned out that he'd been the head of the abver German military intelligence service in Algiers his code name was Harlequin because almost as soon as he was arrested by American troops as it happens he was handed over to the British and he said I'm an anti-nazi and I'm here to tell you everything that you want to know now our original information about the Krieg's organization in Madrid came from this source codenamed Harlequin and Harlequin was of enormous value he gave a complete wiring diagram order of battle if you like of all his contemporaries in the abandoned before he acted really like a defector and there are two things that are interesting about him one is that he'd been very involved with Charles bed oh I don't if that name means anything to you but Charles Beto was a great friend of the Duke of Windsor King Edward the eighth and what was fascinating about chose bed oh isn't he was the Frenchman who gave his Chateau or lent his Chateau to the Duke of Windsor when he got married to Wallis Simpson and Beddoe was a real old scoundrel and the issue was whether or not he was a pro-nazi he had peddled the idea to the Germans of an oil pipeline from West Africa to North Africa which was going to be vegetable oil and the Germans were very enthusiastic about this and they were going to staff this pipeline with intelligence officers and the issue for the British and Americans before and during the Second World War is the extent to which Beddoe and his relationship with the royal family was compromising turns out according to Harlequin Beddoe was in it up to his neck bed Oh incidentally committed suicide in Florida after he'd been brought back to the United States by the FBI so Harlequin was a really interesting guy persuaded to to help the British and then when he realized that he'd been sucked dry he felt obviously quite aggrieved by the treatment that he had received and asked I think quite honorably to return to a ver marked uniform which he was issued to go into a prisoner of war camp and be restored into the German military and he was then sent over to the United States to a Pierre W camp in Germany of course his fellow German officers never suspecting that he had been cooperating him this way so the whole story of Harlequin was fascinating and obviously enchanted Churchill because Churchill wanted you to know more about the subject the other spy that he that church I mean he was interested in a lot of them but this special the second big special report was on Columbine again you don't read about Columbine in any of the other books about the Second World War this was about another scoundrel but he was a good old-fashioned Nazi called Hans Zek nat fits and he was an SS officer he had been in the 22nd SS cavalry and he claimed that he had have been imprisoned by the by the Gestapo in Poland because he had refused to participate in an atrocity he had escaped from prison in Warsaw got himself to Stockholm had informed the British authorities in Stockholm of his wish to defect was flown to England where he was debriefed he provided a vast amount of information about the SS and he had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 so in spite of all of that experience he alleged that he was an anti-nazi second and Fitz then broadcast in some of you may be aware of Tom Sefton Delmas a black radio which were these illicit transmissions to German troops during the Second World War transmitted by German emigres a broadcast generally by German EMA graves from Woburn Abbey Zek nan Fitz was indoctrinated into that program and became a broadcaster and he adopted a false name then unfortunately he went back to Germany behaved as a bit of a scoundrel and then in 1964 he worked for the Galen organisation as an intelligence officer and then in 1964 evidence emerged that he had been a war criminal that he had been engaged in an an atrocity in Pinsk on the border of Poland and Ukraine and that he was then convicted of war crimes was imprisoned in Germany escaped from Germany scape from jail went to Cairo then came back and gave himself up to the West German federal authorities and was then imprisoned again for embezzling a large sum of money out of an American heiress I mean this is a really colorful character I mean he may have been a war criminal but this is this is a terrific book that should be written you will not find any references to Columbine anywhere in the official histories or or any of the other books written about the Second World War and I hope if this book does more than anything else that at least it will inspire ten other historians to go into the archives and look at these characters and I won't even begin to tell you about the special report on Garbo who was the Spanish double agent run by mi5 who clearly enchanted with the prime minister who asked for more information another question this lady over here my question is about Shanghai and Hong Kong did they work with the Chinese and trying to infiltrate the Japanese military and how successful was it to work in working with the Chinese to infiltrate the Japanese military administration and second question real quick in the Battle of Arnhem and in the Battle of the Bulge was there any possibility of gaining I mean did mi5 slip up and not getting the right information to military authorities okay first to deal with with with Shanghai it's a tragic story Shanghai was the responsibility of The Secret Intelligence Service and the SAS station commander there was a man called Harry Steptoe and there were about 150 British police officers in the International Settlements and hairy Steptoe ran the special branch so there was a very effective counter espionage and counterintelligence operation conducted in Shanghai with or without the cooperation of the Chinese they didn't really in the International Settlement didn't really care and treated the Chinese pretty badly but it was a pretty effective organization but when the Japanese arrived all of that collapsed and hairy Steptoe who had diplomatic protection was taken back to Japan not treated particularly well and then was exchanged was actually in a diplomatic exchange was taken by ship to Mozambican and repatriated he was never the same again he was always very mentally he was quite unstable after after that experience and no there was no cooperation with the Chinese against the Japanese as regards Hong Kong that was the responsibility of mi5 the Security Service because that was part of the Empire and the the security service officer who was in Hong Kong was withdrawn before the Japanese occupation as regards Market Garden and the attack on Arnim the the issue there was whether or not not so much the the preparation and the military briefing for the the paratroops before they went into Market Garden that was not the responsibility of either sis or mi5 that was really shaf supreme headquarters Allied expeditionary force and 21st Army Group which had its own intelligence organization they just simply got it wrong that there was an SS armored division at Arnhem on rest and recuperation from the Russian front it was a crack organization I've forgotten the divisional number but it was a big surprise to to the Polish and British paratroops to find themselves landing on the crack as a SS Brigade SS division however it is true that there was great concern that the plan for Market Garden had been betrayed and there was anxiety that a Dutch agent whose code name was King Kong might have supplied information to the obverse and betrayed all the details of Market Garden before the attack even began and King Kong was brought to England was interrogated and he gave a partial confession certainly of working for the abbé fair and when he was returned to the Dutch for prosecution and trial he committed suicide so we had to rely the British had to rely on his handler who was a man called Herman geese Koosh who was brought to England and he was interrogated and he said yes King Kong was my agent we came to an accommodation together he betrayed all the people that he worked with in his organization we tried to be not too heavy-handed to compromise King Kong but no we never had any advance notice of the attack on Neyman thank you I understand as you've stated that mi5 worked in the Commonwealth and the Empire not in the United States of America but I'm sure you know something about roald dahl of Willy Wonka Fame who was a military intelligence officer here in Washington I've read biographies about Henry Wallace the then vice president and also Roald Dahl apparently var will Dahl spied on Henry Wallace learned that Henry Wallace was interested in independence for India reported that back to Prime Minister Churchill who apparently then had influence on Roosevelt in dumping Wallace in favor of Truman do you think that's true no I [Laughter] chose my words very carefully when I described mi5 s responsibilities and I left out the United States I described Trinidad I described Jamaica and I described the the DSO in Bermuda I did not mention British security coordination in New York because that is a real terrible hornets nest because so much nonsense has been written about British security coordination written unfortunately by an unscrupulous Canadian journalist called William Stevenson who wrote a man called intrepid and I asked him why did you write such garbage and he said I never would have done if I had known I was gonna sell 16 million copies and so that the truth is that that BSc included an mi5 representative in New York whose whose name was Walter known as freckles wren and he was one part of an organization headed by Sir William Stevenson who was a wonderful man that included an sis component and mi5 component an SOE component Special Operations Executive and a representative from the political warfare executive so all of those branches were in New York it is quite true that they ran operations in North America many of those operations were highly controversial it made J Edgar Hoover very unhappy to the point that he nearly threw William Stephenson out of the country the the files of full of the the difficulties created by the Stevenson's organization Roald Dahl was a scoundrel he ran out of fuel when he was delivering I think it was a Spitfire rather than hurricane in North Africa he was injured in the crash and there was a policy in Britain to send injured Airmen and soldiers on temporary attachments to the United States in order to impress or deter to point depending upon your point of view the isolationists and Roald Dahl fitted that role he went to the dinner parties in Washington DC he did not have any intelligence collection role that I'm aware of and I'm familiar with the alleged biography that has been written and I'm afraid I found much of it to be to be hard can I put it politely fiction looking back to you had the British intelligence official history which was largely written without human your book is filling in one of the gaps that was left you know in that work and some of the subsequent ones what are the gaps in the history of the Second World War is is there two filled with the role of humans and how can it be they be filled well I wouldn't want to denigrate Harry Hensley too much he the mid the six volumes of the official history are very remarkable historical documents largely based on signals intelligence as you rightly say because that was the deal at the time when he was commissioned by the Cabinet Office and his team to write that official history we're talking about the 1960s and the concept of writing about British intelligence it was a very half-hearted effort because there was a belief that this was an unpatriotic effort that that these documents should never probably leave the Cabinet Office unless there was another war in which case they might be of some value as you rightly say there is not a great deal about human and several reasons for that first of all they were not allowed to see the files relating to the true identities of individual sources secondly there was a view and remains of you in sis that where you give a lifelong promise of confidentiality it's pretty bad for business if you then renege on on that deal so the concentration was on SIGINT and Harry Hensley himself of course although a Cambridge academic had worked at Bletchley Park so he had a prejudice in that respect vol 4 as I vol 5 the one written with Antony Simpkins on security is is more involved with humid and is and is interesting but you're right the the weakness is the lack of humid however there are plenty of gaps that need to be filled one particular one I filled some years ago after a conversation with an sis station commander from been at the end of the Second World War and I said to him is there any secrets left from the Second World War and he said oh yes I think that the way that I had to deliver Canaris his mistress and his three beautiful daughters to a convent in in England at the end of the Second World War was a pretty good secret and I'm not going to tell you about it but I've spent a long time but I tracked down Halina showmance Co who was the mistress and the three beautiful daughters one of whom turned out to live within about half a mile of my front door so there are there are many secrets still to be disclosed and if I was to identify one or encourage somebody to pursue this as you take a look at the Swiss Bundys Pollitz I the Swiss have not d-class fired their archives and we we think they're reticent because of the relationship between Swiss intelligence and the so called Bureau Houseman during the Second World War with German counterparts and there was a relationship between the obverse and certainly Swiss Kantor espionage but we know that the Soviets were heavily involved the rotor dry the red three of course we know about but we still don't know it's one of the great mysteries of the Second World War where did they get their their real-time intelligence from we don't know and I would urge you if you're that way inclined buy a ticket to to bear and spend a couple of weeks weeks being beastly to the archivists well ladies and gentlemen that's about all the time we have but I've received a legal opinion stating that it is not a violation of the Official Secrets Act if you were to buy these secret files from there but it may be a violation of good taste if you fail to do so so please please take yourself a copy of Nigel's book and he will be only too happy to sign it for you thank you very much for being here tonight and Nigel thanks for being with [Applause]

Channel: The International Churchill Society

Views: 3,409

Keywords: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister, Great Britain, Allies, National Churchill Library and Center, NCLC, Nigel West, Churchill's Spy Files, History, WWII

Id: 4xb3FXz4x2I

Length: 53min 14sec (3194 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 14 2019