"The Mystery of the Undetected Radios " Topic

"…After I had put Part 3 of this saga to bed at the end of September, some thoughts that I had vaguely touched on in earlier episodes returned to me with more vigour: What if the mistakes over ter Braak and the controversial report by Walter Gill (which effectively concluded that domestic wireless interception was not necessary) were both deliberate exercises by MI5 and its partners? Were the plans for the double-cross operation that far advanced in the last few months of 1940 that it was considered vital to give indications – in the belief that the Abwehr would pick them up – that Britain's wireless interception policies were so weak that German agents could essentially roam at will, and broadcast home undetected? After all, as early as September 1939, Guy Liddell of MI5 had written that ‘it was in our interests that the Germans should regard us as grossly inefficient in these matters', and that ‘if they thought our organisation was good they might well ask how it was we managed to get his [SNOW's] messages through'. And were the Abwehr's planting of obviously fake identification cards on its agents a deliberate ruse to determine how gullible the British counter-espionage services were?

These may be utterly fanciful notions, but they have a modicum of sense about them, as all such exploits at face value are very difficult to explain. One has to assume that agencies like MI5 and the Abwehr were continually thinking: how will our enemy counterpart think and act? (A British FOES committee did in fact exist: Guy Liddell described it as ‘an inter-services committee that tries to put itself in the position of the enemy intelligence service'.) And, if some sensible insight were applied, each intelligence section should have assumed that its counterpart, because of native influences, might in some circumstances act in a different fashion. Thus, in this instalment, I start to explore the variations in the strategies and successes of the major European-based espionage/sabotage organisations: SOE (Special Operations Executive), the German Abwehr, and the network of the Soviet Union's GRU and KGB spies, and what their controllers should have learned from their experiences in one theatre of war to apply to another. There is a symmetry in some of the things undertaken by each organisation, as they strain to develop measures to confound the forces trying to counter them. Yet one can also spot asymmetrical aspects, driven by the idiosyncratic nature of each force, including their overall motivations and objectives, the personnel they selected, the territorial dimensions, and the cultural drivers behind their operations. It is hard not to suppose, however, that the policies of each were not somehow affected by their knowledge of what their adversaries were doing with their own offensive activities…."
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