Naval Intelligence Division

Naval Intelligence Division (NID), the senior naval staff division of the British Admiralty which, unlike its army and air force counterparts, was an operational as well as an administrative centre. The NID had been considerably run down between the two world wars and had also lost its team of cryptographers (Room 40), transferred to the Secret Service as the government Code and Cypher School under the control of the foreign office (see Bletchley Park). It was organized into ‘geographical’ sections, each gathering naval information on one country or group of countries, invaluable for the forward planning of major operations in war.

The Abyssinian crisis of 1935 sounded the first alarm bells. The Deputy Chief of Naval Staff sent a memorandum to the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) on the need to establish an intelligence centre so that operational intelligence could be transmitted to the fleets and squadrons at sea with the minimum of delay. In June 1937 Paymaster Lt-Commander Norman Denning was selected to organize the creation of an operational intelligence centre (OIC) and to recruit a team to operate it. In January 1939 Rear-Admiral John Godfrey was appointed DNI and, less restricted than his predecessor by treasury limits on expenditure, was able to devote his considerable drive and energy to the expansion of NID as a whole and of OIC in particular in readiness for the war which most recognized was now inevitable. Shortly before war was declared OIC was mobilized and put on a war footing.

Information came to OIC from a variety of sources. A direct telephone and teleprinter link with the network of directional wireless stations provided bearings of all Axis signals which, when plotted in OIC, gave the position of the sender. A similar link with Bletchley Park brought decrypts of signals when cipher breaks were made, and all these within minutes. Advance copies of sighting reports from ships and aircraft arrived direct from the War Registry, the Admiralty department which distributed all signals; and reports from naval attachés in neutral countries (see Bismarck, for example), and from spies in occupied countries reached OIC direct from the foreign office (seeMI6). Information on Axis merchant shipping came from Lloyds and the Baltic Exchange and there were direct telephone lines to all the main home bases and to the individual commands of the RAF. This internal communications network was amplified by authority for OIC to communicate directly with naval forces at sea so that the fruits of operational intelligence could be received by them as soon as it had been assessed in OIC.

In May 1941 Bletchley Park's cryptographers got the break they needed to penetrate the German U-boat cipher (see ULTRA, 1). The capture in the Atlantic of a weather-reporting trawler and a U-boat provided an undamaged ENIGMA machine and invaluable ancillary information which led to the breaking of the heavy ship cipher and the Mediterranean ciphers. The text of decrypted signals reached OIC within minutes and, after assessment and precautions to safeguard the source, was passed to the squadron or fleet concerned. With all its sources of information, coupled with the authority to communicate direct, NID was able, for the first time since its formation in 1886, to operate as a modern and efficient intelligence service.

One of Godfrey's most valuable innovations was to set up, in the geography schools at Oxford, the Inter-Service Topographical Department (ISTD), a group of experts from all three services who collected and collated all sorts of information about ports, coastlines, communications and other points of interest to projected invading forces. Without ISTD's groundwork neither the landings which preceded the North African and Sicilian campaigns, nor the Normandy landings in June 1944 (see OVERLORD), could have succeeded.

Another important section of NID was 17M which handled the Admiralty's non-operational ULTRA intelligence and provided the naval information being fed to the Germans via controlled double agents (see XX-committee). It was formed in December 1940 and headed by an RNVR officer, Lt-Commander Ewen Montagu, who planned one of the more ingenious deception operations of the war (see MINCEMEAT).

Peter Kemp

Bibliography

Beesly, P. , Very Special Intelligence (London, 1977).
Bennett, R. F. , Behind the Battle (2nd edn., London, 1999).
McLachlan, D. H. , Room 39 (London, 1968).
Montagu, E. , Beyond Top Secret U (London, 1977).