MI8
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MI8, or Military Intelligence, Department 8, was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office. It was a British signals intelligence group in World War II.
On the outbreak of World War II it was assumed that the Germans would infiltrate agents into the UK (if they were not in place already), who would communicate vital military secrets by radio, or even establish radio beacons to guide Luftwaffe bombers to their targets. Indeed MI5 had been running a double agent, Arthur Owens (codename 'SNOW'), since September 1938, who had been provided by the Abwehr with a Telefunken radio set.
Vernon Kell, head of MI5, created a new organization designated MI8(c) to counter this threat. It was placed under the command of Major J.P.G Worlledge, an experienced Royal Corps of Signals officer, who immediately selected Major Ralph Sheldon Mansfield, 4th Baron Sandhurst, who had served as a signals officer during WWI and had been recommissioned in 1939, to create the RSS. They were housed in Wormwood Scrubs prison, now evacuated and used as secure office space. From there Sandhurst contacted Arthur Watts, a veteran of Gallipoli, now the President of the Radio Society of Great Britain, who enthusiastically offered the services of his organization. The entire RSGB Council were inducted into RSS, and began to recruit their members as Voluntary Interceptors (VIs).
The VIs were mostly working men of non-military age, working in their own time and using their own equipment (naturally their transmitters has been impounded on the outbreak of war, but their receivers were not). They were ordered to ignore commercial and military traffic and to concentrate on more elusive transmissions. Each VI was given a minimum number of intercepts to make each month, which if reached gave them exemption from other duties, such as fire watching.
RSS also established a series of Radio Direction Finding stations in the far corners of the British Isles in order to identify the locations of the transmissions they were intercepting.
Within three months 50 VIs were at work and identified over 600 transmitters - all firmly on the other side of the English Channel. In fact all German agents entering the UK were promptly captured and either interned or "turned" to operate as double agents under the supervision of the "XX Committee".
Initially the messages logged by the VIs were sent to Wormwood Scrubs, but soon the volume became so great that larger premises were sought. A large country house, Arkley View, near Barnet, was requisitioned for the purpose with the cryptic address of Box 25, Barnet. There a staff of analysts and cryptographers began their duties. By May 1940 it was clear that RSS's mission - to locate enemy agents in the UK - was complete.
RSS in effect had become the civilian counterpart of the military's "Y Service" intercept network, and were often more skilled. By mid-1941 up to 10,000 logs (message sheets) a day were sent to Arkley before being forwarded to the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. The success of the RSS, and the fact that some of its personnel had managed to decode some Abwehr cyphers ahead of Bletchley, meant that control of the organization was transferred to MI6 in May 1941.
The new controller of RSS was Lt.-Col. E.F. Maltby, and from 1942 Lt.-Col. Kenneth Morton Evans was appointed Deputy Controller. Well-financed, and equipped with a new central radio station at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire (designated Special Communications Unit No.3), it became the communication and interception service of MI6 which previously had no such capability. The Abwehr was now monitored round the clock and the volume and regularity of the material obtained enabled Bletchley to achieve one of its great triumphs. In December 1941, the Enigma cypher of the Abwehr was broken, giving enormous insight into German intelligence operations. At its peak RSS employed around 1,500 people, not counting the VI's.
At the end of the war RSS was absorbed by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
[edit] Further reading
- West, Nigel. GCHQ: The Secret Wireless War 1900-1986. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-41197-X.
- Geoffrey Pidgeon (2003). The Secret Wireless War: The story of MI6 Communications 1939-1945. UPSO Ltd. ISBN 1-84375-252-2.
[edit] See also
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