Hitler's Secret Army by Tim Tate

Author:Tim Tate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

* The Registry was housed in the remarkably vulnerable former prison laundry – a glass-roofed workshop offering little or no protection to the collection of vital national security information.

† Ironside was appointed Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces on May 27, 1940.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Witch-finding

‘If we are found out we might get ten or 25 years. We are only women. But you will have your heads chopped off’

Molly Hiscox, spy, March 13, 1941

On Saturday, January 25, 1941, Winston Churchill sat down to compose a memo to the two newest members of his War Cabinet. The previous October he had moved Sir John Anderson from the Home Office, replacing him with the politically more progressive (but administratively superior) Herbert Morrison; two months later, just before Christmas, he finally managed to ease Lord Halifax out of the Foreign Office, dispatching him to Washington, DC as Britain’s US Ambassador and appointing the distinctly more hawkish Anthony Eden in his stead.*

The subject on the Prime Minister’s mind that morning was the Fifth Column – and more specifically, the efforts of the Security Service to uncover and neutralise it: he was not happy about either, advising the Home and Foreign Secretaries that, in his opinion, ‘the witch-finding activities of MI5 are becoming an actual impediment to the more important work of the department’.1

Churchill’s memo was strangely timed. Between the outbreak of war and January 1941, 36 men and women had been successfully prosecuted for offences under the Official Secrets Act or Defence Regulations; each was convicted of espionage, sabotage or aiding the enemy, and given a prison sentence ranging from two months to twenty years. More pertinently, at the very moment the Prime Minister communicated his displeasure, Security Service agents were preparing to give evidence in three new and very serious trials of British fascists working on behalf of Nazi Germany.

Those cases would reveal the involvement of the Nordic League, Archibald Ramsay’s Right Club and Leigh Vaughan-Henry’s unnamed group of plotters in what were unequivocally acts of treachery. But their outcomes also exposed the deepening fault-lines undermining the war against Hitler’s British Fifth Column.

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