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Will it be the low prices or the great brands? You'll love the deals. You'll love Burlington. I told you so. Styles and selections vary by store. Hello and welcome to another episode of Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop. Today, we're going to look at an ever appealing aspect of the war. The clandestine struggle waged by both sides to discover each other's secrets and to confuse their understanding of what was going on.
It was something that the British, with some justification, had a reputation for being rather good at. And today we're going to be hearing about one of the most skilful practitioners of the art of espionage, the British MI6 officer Wilfred Biffy Dunderdale. With me to talk about him is Tim Spicer, who's just written a brilliant biography of the man. It's called A Suspicion of Spies, Risks, Secrets and Shadows. It's astonishingly well-researched and a great read.
It's not due to be published until September, but it's well worth the wait. Well, Tim is a man of action himself, as well as an author. He served in the Scots Guards in the Falklands and went on to have an eventful and distinguished career before founding the Aegis Defence Company. Tim, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. So, Biffy Dunderdale, what a character.
Tell us how you came across him and what compelled you to write the book. I came across Biffy, A Dangerous Enterprise. It was about a clandestine group of boats owned by MI6 transporting agents across the channel from Dartmouth in Devon to Brittany.
And one of their main customers was this fellow called Wilfred Biffy Dunderdale. And I thought, well, that's really quite interesting. I did a bit of research on him to put it in context and found that he had the most extraordinary life. And above everything else, who could resist the name? I mean, straight out of Tintin.
He was one of those extraordinary cosmopolitan Englishmen that don't really exist anymore, wasn't he? He was born in Odessa, went to school in St. Petersburg, and spoke three or four languages fluently. Tell us a bit about those kind of expatriate Britons who were a great resource, weren't they, for the British security services? Well, there was a time, and again, you're right, I think that that sort of breed of adventurous entrepreneurial spirit
type of Brit is not as common as it used to be. Biffy's father was a proper full-on entrepreneur and lived in Odessa, in fact, Nikolaev actually, and he was into shipping, oil, grain, any sort of trading. And he was not alone. There were families dotted all around the Black Sea and in Constantinople and in Smyrna before it got burnt in the Turkish Civil War.
And when MI6 or SIS was founded, inevitably, as a new government department, but essential to the security of the country, it was underfunded.
And Admiral Mansfield, or Captain Mansfield Cumming, as he was then, the head of SIS, co-opted patriotic expats around the world to enhance his intelligence gathering capability. And Biffy's father was undoubtedly one of them. So in 1928, Biffy gets his first major job, which is station chief in Paris. He's very young to have this very important post. But
But he's ideally qualified for it. Now, reading your account of Biffy's activities there in Paris, it really does sound like a sort of Hollywood version of the spy's life, doesn't it? He rides around in a Rolls Royce. He's out every night.
at the city's nightclubs or drinking with Deuxième Bureau colleagues at the Traveller's Club. It's all true, but it's almost unbelievably romantic the way he conducts his espionage activities. Well, I mean, just to put his posting in context, this is a young man, I mean, you're quite right, age 26, you know, unheard of probably to be a head of station in a significant country like France.
But he had already, to his name, two Russian imperial decorations and two mentions in dispatches for various activities, which earned him his spurs. And then he spent a bit of time in Constantinople. His lifestyle, I mean, he took a conscious decision. He was extremely well off, loaded, and in Paris at the time.
He would have either had to have some sort of permanent cover, whether it be journalists, businessmen, whatever, which he would have to maintain 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And he took a view that he would sort of hide in plain sight and he would be an accredited diplomat at the British embassy, but had very little to do with them. He didn't really get on with the ambassadors, except one of them. And he would live his rather flamboyant lifestyle
and be able to conduct his intelligence activities using that as a sort of open cover. The thing that he did that was really clever was getting very close to the Dossier Bureau. And he had a fantastic working relationship with the senior officers of the Dossier Bureau beginning in 1926. And of course, having to have a break in 1940 when he had to get out in a hurry,
but he maintained those links throughout the war. Just explain for the listeners what the Deuxième Bureau does. The Deuxième Bureau was basically the French Foreign Intelligence Service, same as MI6.
So what's he actually trying to do at this point? I mean, as the 30s progress, you've basically got two enemies, haven't you? You've got the Soviet Union and you've got Nazi Germany. How does he go about his business? What is he trying to do? Well, in 1926, the focus was still on the Bolsheviks or the emerging Soviet Union. And he continued basically an extension of his work from the Russian Civil War in the Crimea to
and Constantinople, where he would recruit or gather intelligence and recruit agents from the very large expatriate white Russian community in Paris, because they'd all, those that had left after the revolution, with a view, I think, to uncovering Bolshevik activities in the West, which he was quite successful at. And I suppose also playing back agents into Russia. That bit is a bit more opaque to find out.
And then gradually, with events like the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler, the focus of his activities switched towards Nazi Germany. And he had quite a big patch, not just France and the liaison there, but obviously penetration of Russia, penetration of Germany. He was responsible. I mean, he sort of had head of station in Norway in brackets after his name.
And he was also responsible for large chunks of the Mediterranean. His biggest coup, I suppose, on the eve of the war concerns the Enigma machine. I think there's a bit of a mistaken belief abroad that somehow, you know, cracking the German military codes, all the rest of it was largely a British operation. We all know about Bletchley Park, etc. But it's more complicated and interesting than that, isn't it? The Poles, of course, play a vital part in
And Biffy plays a vital part in bringing the Poles on board. Yeah, the recognition of the Polish cracking of Enigma and bringing it to the attention of the West is sort of overshadowed by the role, very significant role in the war of Bletchley and the codebreakers. And they quite rightly deserve their accolades. But
In the run-up to the war, the Poles had worked out that German communications were uncrackable. Military communications were uncrackable. So they set a team of three mathematicians to try and crack the problem. The Enigma machine was commercially available. It had been developed as a commercial cipher machine. The
The Poles got several of them. They also did a sort of clandestine interception of a parcel which contained one of these things. They were able to have a very good look at it. And between their cipher bureau and these newly recruited mathematicians, they up to a point cracked it. And of course,
The Enigma was complicated in its basic instance. I'm not an expert on coding machines, but as the Germans wanted to use it more and more, they made it more and more difficult with different encryption wheels inside the machine. And Biffy's role in this was that the French...
came to him and said, "Look, we really need to start reading these German codes. We should be talking to the Poles." So between the French and Biffy, they got alongside the Poles and the Poles were very willing to be helpful. Staggeringly, when this was reported to London and the French, in the shape of Gustave Bertrand, the French cryptographic officer, reported to his seniors, there was lack of interest.
Both Bertrand and Biffy were astounded. So they slightly went ahead under their own steam. What it resulted in was the Poles having a conference in Warsaw where they showed both the French and the Brits, by which time there were some people from Bletchley, or the Government Code and Cipher School, as it was called then, what they had achieved. And at the end of the meeting, they promised to give a copy of the Enigma machine to both France and Britain, which was done. And Biffy
brought the Enigma on the Golden Arrow train from Paris to Victoria Station and handed it over to his boss, Stuart Menges. This is almost on the eve of war, where it was hastily dispatched to Bletchley. And that, if you like, started the ball rolling. And of course, the work of the
other mathematicians and people like Alan Turing at Bletchley enhanced this and between them they were able to crack the enigma. I mean, there are various other things that happened like captured code books and various other things.
But it became so critical to the war effort that when France was collapsing, Biffy was told in no uncertain terms, you will get out, we are sending an airplane for you because you cannot be captured. We cannot let the Germans know that we're working on this. So when the war begins, you've got this great coup with Enigma. But on the other hand, at the human intelligence level, MI6 is in pretty bad shape, isn't it?
They lost almost all their agents when the war began, when the Germans rolled into France in June 1940. So they're kind of starting from scratch, aren't they? Tell us a bit about that. But before we go there, can you say something about the rivalries within the secret intelligence services themselves?
It probably won't come as much of a surprise to listeners that the secret world is riven by all sorts of rivalries and jealousies and competing factions. Well, I think probably the most difficult rivalry and friction within the British intelligence world in the Second World War was the creation, and we're slightly getting ahead of ourselves, and I'll come back to the French in a minute, but the creation of SOE. You'd better explain what that is. Special Operations Executive. Yes.
caused the Secret Intelligence Service some considerable problems. And if you think about it, it's quite logical. Before the war, SIS had a department called Section D, which some people call Section D for destruction. I'm not sure about that. But it was an in-house department.
sabotage and special operations department. And for some reason, I think because it didn't do very well in the early part of the war, it wasn't very effective. And it was called unprepared for the German invasion of France. It was closed down. And you know, the famous Churchillian directive to SOE set Europe ablaze.
was not really conducive to what SIS was doing. SIS's job was to collect strategic intelligence in order to enable us to counter German efforts. And the priorities were, in the first instance, are they going to invade and when?
Secondly, after that threat had gone away after the Battle of Britain, it was the U-boats strangling the Atlantic convoys. And then eventually it became the V weapons, the V1 and V2 rockets. Now, if you think about it, in an occupied territory, you're trying to gather intelligence, for example, in the dockyard of Brest or Le Havre or somewhere, about German battleships. And you've got a parallel organization not under your control, charged with blowing things up and conducting sabotage.
The two are sort of mutually exclusive, because if you blow something up, the next thing that's going to happen, the Germans are going to crack down, do a roundup, and they may well pick up your agents who are photographing the Scharnhorst and Neusenauer in Dry Dog and take them out of the game. So it was complicated. And of course, within that, then there were various different factions within the Secret Intelligence Service who...
inevitably competing for resources and recognition, etc. So you have this complicated situation where the SIS is completely blind in Europe. Churchill's given a directive to form this rival organization. And you have a further complication in that you have one general or colonel as he was to begin with, Charles de Gaulle, who arrived and plonked himself in London and said, right, I'm the Free French. And I'm going to have my own intelligence service and my own sabotage service.
So SIS rather cleverly thought, okay, we've got to deal with the French. This is really important because that's going to be our focus for the next few years. What Biffy had done before the collapse in 1940, he was so close to the Deuxième Bureau that he knew that they had to a man taken, if you like, a sort of Spartan type oath that they would go to Vichy, they would obey orders and
But they would continue to work with Biffy for SIS. And so that was a godsend. Biffy came back, got out of France, came back and said, look, this is the situation. We just need to get them a radio, which he eventually did. And then they were up and running. And Stuart May is the boss. And Claude Danzy, his number two, said, yeah, but what about de Gaulle? And so cleverly, they thought, OK, we've got to have two French sections.
And they had one that dealt with de Gaulle overtly, you know, we're helping you, the free French. And unbeknownst to them, they had Biffy's section who was dealing with Vichy. I think this is a really interesting point in your book, Tim, because I think people will be surprised to hear that people working for Vichy, inside Vichy,
inside the collaborationist regime, but at the same time sending important intelligence back to the UK for use in the war effort. I think there's a sort of belief that everyone inside Vichy was a thoroughgoing collaborator, but it was a lot more complicated and nuanced than that.
So with the help of his former Dursian Bureau colleagues, Biffy does manage to set up a pretty impressive array of networks, doesn't he? I think there are 33 networks, something like 1,200 agents working for them in the course of the war. What were they doing and what contribution did they make to the war effort? Well, before I just itemize that, I should also say that Biffy was given responsibility
for the Free Polish Intelligence Service as well, and liaison with the Poles, who, again, many people don't really know how many expatriate Poles were in France and how many fled to Britain, you know, post-Norway and post-Dunkirk. So there was a huge Polish organization, which he was charged with being liaison officer with.
And the Poles had set up networks in France, so it became even more complicated. But Biffy's networks, at the end of the day, quite a lot of them were rolled up very quickly because they were amateurs. They didn't really understand the intelligence game. And their enemy was very professional and very ruthless, the Gestapo, the SD, and Odebrecht.
of course they were smart in that they recruited French collaborators, the Mélisse and others, the Boni-Lefont gang, who did their dirty work and they did it in a very dirty manner. But by the sort of, after they got over the hiccups, he had two very, very sound networks, the Jade networks, Jade Amical and Jade Fitzroy. And again, they took quite a few knocks from the Gestapo, but Jade Amical continued really from 1940 to the liberation of Paris. And it was very effective.
as was the Polish network F2. And I suppose those two networks were Biffy's success story. And of course, behind it was cooperation with the Vichy, who were extremely helpful. They were looking for strategic intelligence. And that, I've already said, was graduated from invasion to U-boats to surface raiders, and then eventually the V-weapons.
But they were also, if you like, a second tier tasking was German order of battle, German deployments. And this was becoming increasingly important as the balance changed and we were about to go on the offensive.
And with the impending invasion of Europe, again, coastal defenses, logistic hubs, all the things that were of importance at a strategic level for the invasion of Normandy. So what are we talking about? Are they going around hoovering up by observation what they can see of the German military dispositions?
Or is it more trying to infiltrate the German organizations, trying to get agents inside who will be handing over serious hard intel? It was quite difficult to recruit Germans. I mean, I think that that was not successful because you had the rather nasty end of the German counterintelligence, but you also had the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.
who were very capable and very dedicated, and subverting them or recruiting agents of German nationals, I think, was extremely difficult. I think there were some. Biffy's remit was quite wide, and with his Polish contacts, the Poles operated really from France all the way back to Poland. And I can give you one instance, which I'll do in a minute, but their focus was really
to gather intelligence from French people who were still working in places like docks and factories. And he had a very good entree into the rail network. And of course, troop movement and logistic movement, a lot of rail movement. So it was very, very important to know what was going where.
He also recruited people in a factory in Paris that was making parts for German jet fighters, the ME 262, I think it was, which resulted in the RAF coming and bombing the Renault works and destroying it just outside Paris.
A V2 rocket crashed on a riverbank in Poland, deep in Poland. It's a long way from, you know, it's behind enemy lines. The Poles grabbed the whole thing, took it to bits, got the important bits out that people wanted to know about the engine, the motor, the gyro stuff and the fuel content. And a Dakota, a DC-3 aircraft, was flown from Italy, from Bari,
to Poland, landed in a field, picked this thing up and brought it back. Okay, that's enough for part one. Join us after the break. Freshly made ravioli or hand-pulled ramen noodles? When you dine with Chase Sapphire Reserve, either will be amazing because it's the choice between a front row seat at the chef's table while getting a live demo of how to make ravioli or dining family style as you hear the story behind your ramen broth. This weekend, it's ravioli.
Next weekend, ramen. Find the detail that moves you with immersive dining experiences from Sapphire Reserve. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval.
Now tell us something about Sheila Green. I was intrigued to hear about this intrepid woman who's there from the very start, from 1940. She's really part of the family, isn't she? This is a world in which people are very much related to each other. They marry each other. They socialize with each other.
But she's not a very well-known name, is she? Which is rather surprising given what she got up to. I know. And she was very well-recognized by the French, but not so much by the British. Her story is extraordinary. Her father, Thomas Green, was a Newry whiskey distiller millionaire. And he sold up his business and moved to France.
where he lived a very similar lifestyle to Biffy, had plenty of money, and they became friends. And I don't quite know who said what to whom, but basically, Tom Green volunteered to work for SIS for free. He didn't need the salary. And he had three daughters.
of which Sheila was the most sort of, and they all worked for SIS in the office in Paris. But in 1940, they all had to evacuate. The whole station was evacuated. But Sheila said, look, why don't I stay here?
because I speak fluent French. I have an Irish passport, so technically I'm a neutral. And we have a house in, we have an apartment in Paris, which they actually sealed up. But they had a house in Nice in the south, which was in the unoccupied zone. And rather surprisingly, Tom Green said, okay, if that's what you want to do. I mean, she was quite a headstrong, tough girl. And she left Paris, did exactly what she said she would do,
went to Nice and met another fellow, I'm talking family relations, who was a friend of the Dunderdales. He was a fellow called George Kuhn, was another trader from the Levant who'd left and moved his business to Constantinople, then Paris and London. And he had a house in Antibes and his son, Philip Kuhn, had already moved
sort of come across the books of SIS. So between them, she hooked up with Philip Kuhn. They started what became the Jade Amicol network. And Sheila had three responsibilities in the network. She was in charge of all air landing and parachute landing, i.e. Lysander operations, whereby agents were flown in to fields in France.
and others were brought out or people on the run were brought out. And she organized the landing zones for parachute drops for equipment and for agents and other things. And then as inroads were made by the Gestapo into the networks and people were killed or deported to concentration camps, she also took on a sort of welfare role
of looking after the families of people whose husbands, sons, etc. were disappeared. And she did this right up until 1944 and the liberation of France. And then, extraordinarily, she said, because the SIS came back to Paris, her father came back to set up an office there early after the liberation of Paris. She said, "Look, I want to continue my work. I will need to find these people who've disappeared."
And so she was given a path to follow the Allied armies into Germany to try and locate Biffy's agents that had disappeared, were in concentration camps. And she was very successful. And she came back, just to sort of finish talking about her.
married a chap called Charles Garton who worked in Biffy's office in London, also in SIS, and he retired. They both retired from SIS because they were going to be posted somewhere behind, I think, the Iron Curtain, and I think they'd had enough, four years of warfare, and they retired to Somerset. And her children, her current, you know, her children who are still alive today, didn't really know any of this, found some old medals and documents and things lying around,
and I sort of introduced them to what their mother and grandmother had done. And they said, "Oh, well that explains lots of things." And for a long time after the war, she wouldn't allow any noise in the house at all and would sit for quite long periods of time looking at the approach roads to the manor house they lived in.
And of course, that was what she'd had to do living a clandestine life in France. A misplaced footstep, a creaking door, a black Citroen car pulling up outside with men in leather coats. And it was sort of habit for her. This, of course, is a period when intelligence becomes even more vital, doesn't it? There's a plan to send in really to kind of flood the place with agents. This is called the Sussex Plan.
Tell us about that and how effective it was. Plan Sussex stemmed really from this dilemma that SIS had between the Free French and their own networks and agents in France. And of course, behind all that, their liaison with Vichy. And relationships with de Gaulle's embryonic service, intelligence service,
got very, very tricky. And of course, there were things like competing resources. Biffy wanted to recruit Frenchmen to go into France. The Free French said, no, they're ours. And it just sort of created internal friction. The Free French section of SIS was run by a fellow called Kenneth Cohen, who was a very capable intelligence officer. And his great success was a network, which some of your listeners may have heard of, called Allianz. And
They all had animal code names. And there was a very famous book written because the Germans had coined the name Noah's Ark for them for obvious reasons. But they continued to operate really from 1940-41 to the end of the war. And what happened to create Plan Sussex?
Basically, everybody had to have their heads knocked together, the Free French, the two SIS French sections, in order to get this thing on an even keel and concentrate on the collective war effort rather than individual rivalries. So Kenneth Cohen was tasked with creating planned Sussex, whereby mixed teams, and by the way, the Americans coming to the war, obviously, were the embryonic
OSS, Office of Strategic Services, who were another sort of cog in the intelligence wheels. And finally, the Plan Sussex called for teams of three agents, one British, one French, and one American, to drop into the area behind the invasion beaches in order to coordinate both intelligence gathering in the first instance and sabotage operations in the second instance.
So in other words, what should have happened throughout the war finally was emerged in about late 1943. What contribution do they make to Allied planning? I think it was very successful. I mean, they did flood the sort of hinterland of France with teams up into southern Belgium and as far down as the Pyrenees.
And I think that they had the balance right. They contacted both intelligence networks and by this time, what was referred to, I suppose, as the MACI, the fighting element of the French resistance, who was becoming incredibly frustrated because the Germans had killed lots of them, because it was premature. It wasn't the right time to go active and dig out their weapons from their hides and start killing Germans.
But the Sussex teams coordinated the sort of synchronization of that. It kept offensive action away from important intelligence gathering right up to the invasion. And the point at which somebody pressed a button and said, right, go active and start killing Germans and blowing up bridges and
etc. Yeah, that's a bit of a corrective, isn't it, to this view that you hear sometimes that spies don't actually contribute very much, and their contribution to the Second World War was limited, to say the least. But you would take issue with that, I imagine. I would certainly take issue with that. I think that in any military campaign, and particularly the invasion of Europe, intelligence is absolutely critical. We could not have done the D-Day landings
without intelligence provided by the Secret Intelligence Service and indeed the French, the Free French. They understood it too. But there comes a time when you've used the intelligence to plan your invasion and you need then to be able to enhance intelligence
the sort of tactical military capability, the elements coming ashore, by preventing German reinforcements or German logistics support. And that's a time when offensive action becomes important. Now, Biffy's story after the war is not quite so dramatic. He does have some successes, but it's really a situation where the old order is changing, the new rather less flamboyant, less buccaneering kind of element comes into play.
But when he retires eventually, Biffy is very much garlanded with honors. He's a legendary figure in the Secret Intelligence Service.
But it does sort of raise the question, doesn't it, Tim, will we ever see the like of Biffy Dunderdale again? Difficult to say. I mean, one, of course, would like to see Biffy Dunderdale's around the world. I think the way he operated is no longer possible. I think it's very difficult for intelligence officers to operate given modern technology, if you like, and the ability to
would not to operate so much in the shadows. And I think also there is perhaps a lack of desire to be aggressive in the obvious way that he were able to do. And I think
that as things developed after the Second World War, people of his ilk were finding it harder to conduct the sort of operations they were used to doing in a rather freebooting and flamboyant, well, flamboyant is the wrong word because you can't run an intelligence operation being that flamboyant, but technology became more important, the ability to hide and have cover more difficult. And then, of course, in the modern era of technology,
total, if you like, digital surveillance of everything everybody does makes it much harder. I don't think we're going to see Biffy's. There'll be plenty of brave intelligence officers out there doing their stuff, but not in the same way. That was terrific, Tim. So thank you very much for coming on the pod. Listeners, look out for Tim's book. It's called A Suspicion of Spies, Risk, Secrets and Shadows, the biography of Wilfred Biffy Dunderdale, out in a couple of months' time. Goodbye. Goodbye.