Chapter 4: Room 44

As ordered Tony reported to room 44 at the War Office on the 5th January. It was a cold January day with flakes of winter snow in the air. Room 44 was more like a department with a large conference room with side rooms. He was a little surprised to be met by a very young and very attractive sexy blonde female Wing Commander in the RAF. He noticed that she wore the wings of a pilot which was unusual for WAAF. They were the only two people in the room and she gave Tony a big friendly smile and invited him to sit down.

"I am Wing Cdr Sadie Rowan and I expect that you are as surprised as I was, when I found myself here It was only yesterday that I found that I had been appointed to command this new unit. I was also surprised, and highly delighted to find that you had been appointed as my second in command, but I don't think you remember me do you Commander?"

Tony said "No maa'm I am sorry but I must be blind or drunk not to have remembered you."

"Well I am not surprised, because it was on the Fairy Queen, on the return from Dunkirk that I saw you standing on that open bridge. I was there when you were so viciously gunned down. I saw you valiantly struggle to your feet, time and time again, to try and keep command of the ship, and get us back safely, and when you did finally collapse, I helped the army medics bandage you up when they attended to you."

"I hope you will excuse my poor memory in those circumstances maa'm Tony said, but I knew I would have remembered you had I been fully conscious."

She gave a little giggle." Well Tony down to business. I was only briefed yesterday. This is a new unit set up to search out nasty people, who also came across with us from Dunkirk, and who don't really want us to win the war, or who in many cases find themselves being blackmailed into working for the Nazi's and who keep selling our secrets to Adolf. Our new unit will comprise a mixture of both civilian and service people, all with a variety of expertise which should be useful in our task. We do not have any power of arrest, because it is essential we must remain incognito in order to continue our work. In other words we find the nasty people by various devious means, collate what evidence we can, and turn them over to the boys in blue or MI5. You are an expert in signals, and also Business Administration Graduate, and you are also fluent in German. I am a psychology graduate and fluent in French,. tomorrow we will be joined by about twenty more people who between us we have to get organised and get working."

Tony said "It sounds interesting, but it all sounds as though it could be a bit dangerous."

Sadie then said. "That was my first thoughts as well, but on reflection maybe it will be more interesting than dangerous. You see most of these people are not real agents as such, they just listen to rumours or they approach service people, get friendly and probably buy them a few drinks, seduce them, or even blackmail them into revealing little bits of what seems non important information, by finding out what unit they serve in, where they are stationed and what sort of equipment they have. It works like a jig saw with lots of snippets of information coming together to complete the bigger picture. They are also interested in the war factories, where they make guns and airplanes and things."

We see all the posters about careless talk and its amazing how a number of rumours can lead to the truth being discovered. For this reason care has to be taken in various ways. Apparently there was a destroyer in Portsmouth only last week which was issued with tropical kit, and soon everyone was saying

"Oh they are off to the Med or the Far East, especially when they got jabs for Cholera. The dockies went home and told their wives, the crew went ashore, and were talking about what they were going to buy their girl friends in Gibraltar and so on in the local pub. So you can see how a little thing like that can tell the enemy a lot, that's why the government has to clamp down on careless talk. Our intelligence picked up from an agent, that the Germans already knew that they had been issued with tropical kit."

"Did they get to the Med?" "No Tony they offloaded the Kit at Scapa and the Admiralty sent them to Iceland instead. We also know that some of these involuntary agents are required to report back on how accurate the Luftwaffe were the night before in bombing raids, or they are even told to light fires or flash torches near armament factories to guide the Luftwaffe on to their targets."

We have to do what is necessary to get the goods on these people within certain limits. "Well Sadie my marriage is on the rocks, my wife found another man, and so I suppose it may not be too much of a problem, if I have to put myself out a bit. Some of it could all become a bit boring I suppose " Tony said.

"We also have to look at one or two so called neutral consulates. If we can prove that they are obtaining information, and passing it on to the Nazi's, the government will act. But on some occasions we can also use informants by priming them with false and misleading information and so the idea is that we will make them work unwittingly for us without their knowledge. In your case you are going to be billeted with the Second Sea Lord, and you will have a desk in his department at the Admiralty. You will be given a non essential task which is to be made to sound very hush hush as we want to draw some of these people on to you. I will be doing something similar in the Air Ministry. We will be given freedom of movement but we report our movements back through our admin officer here who we will met tomorrow."

Sadie looked at her watch and then said. "Tony we have a lunch appointment with our titular boss from MI5 where we will be further briefed. Before we go please call me Sadie when we are on our own, we have to work closely together, so to a large extent service formality must go out the window, so at times will our uniforms. We are also free to wear civilian clothes if we consider it helps us in our job, and Tony I for one propose to take full advantage of that concession."

The gentleman from MI5 who was their titular boss was a typical civil servant. His name was Arthur and he was very pleasant, and very informative, but Tony felt that there was a certain amount of reluctance on his part to give too much away to amateurs like them. It was a pleasant lunch, on completion of their lunch, he handed Sadie a pile of files of personnel and a list of people and places where service personnel had recently reported being approached, or had noted some suspicious behaviour, or perhaps they had been quietly pumped for information in a pub or club somewhere. There were also many reports of people seen acting suspiciously. In most cases there was not enough evidence for the security service, or the police to act, or enough personnel available to investigate all the complaints, and this was where the Room 44 unit came in, your job is to go and investigate the suspicions from members of the public, and to either verify or discount the suspicions. You look listen and report back, on no account are you to take any actions yourselves."

Sadie and Tony spent the afternoon going through the files of Personnel that had been allocated to them They all seemed to have quite distinguished records, and between them a multitude of skills. He also noticed that most of the service people had all suffered serious injuries of one type or another and were on light duties. The unit was mostly men, but their was a sprinkling of women usually with specialist skills. One woman who was to become very important to the Unit was a civilian lady called Tracy Morgan, a middle aged woman who had been seconded from one of the other ministries. She was appointed to be the executive officer and handle all the administration. She would have two other women and a retired army officer to work with her.

The next morning, they had an assembled crowd of about 35 people from different branches, both senior NCOs' and officers of the three services plus a few civilians. Between them they had a whole range of specialists. The one thing they had in common was the bewildered look on their faces as they came into the room one by one, especially when they viewed the motley assembly of uniforms from the different services.

As Tony looked round the room it was quite a sight with a myriad of uniforms and personnel, very few of them being acquainted with one another. Sadie insisted the doors were locked and a sentry posted outside before she opened the meeting. She went through the aims of the unit and then turned over the meeting to Tony to cover the administration aspects of the project.

Tony and Sadie had decided that initially he would keep each service in their own service groups. This would encourage people to get to know each other The five civilians formed a group of their own. He explained that later the groups may well be reformed later, but much would depend on the measure of their success. He finished by saying.

"This is a new unit, a lot of us between us have seen a lot of active service, and received some horrific injuries but this is something new, and we will just have to feel our way as we go. We probably will not have a long life, but with the evacuation from Dunkirk and the continual drift of people making their way across the channel in small boats we now have many new people in the country, and we have no means of checking their backgrounds. If we do our jobs properly we will save lot of lives and help to win the war. Mot of these people are being blackmailed into helping the Nazis as they have relatives back home in Europe. The Nazis threaten to send their relatives to concentration camps unless they co-operate"

Sadie pointed out that the following day they would start a training programme which would last about two weeks. She explained how the many agents who had had slipped into the country through the evacuation of Dunkirk posed such a big threat. They were not necessarily professional agents, but in the main their job was getting low level intelligence, and they themselves were still in the process of getting themselves full organised. Four of the civilians attached to the unit would concentrate on intercepting radio traffic keeping a 24 hour watch and would work with the various police, and army signal intercepting units and reporting suspicious radio traffic.

She gave an example of the type of thing they were up against, by describing how an aircraft factory near Birmingham had been earmarked by an agent lighting three small fires in oil drums round the perimeter of the factory which would guide aircraft on to the target. She said fortunately a policeman found them and quickly had them re- sited them round an empty field nearby. The field shortly afterwards was saturated with high explosive and incendiary bombs.

At the end of the meeting she told all of them that they would be billeted for the next two weeks in the Thistle Hotel near the War Office, but further accommodation would be sorted out by the Administrative officer, depending on where they were to be stationed. Most of the service people would be attached or located near to military units or airfields around the country and that was one of the reasons why they had been selected from the different services. You will have virtually nominal duties and will have freedom to enter and leave your duties and barracks whenever the need arrives. This will be arranged with your new C.O's but that is all they will know. You must resist any discussion of what your real purpose is. It is important that you get to know as many of your messmates as possible and where they go in their free time, because that is where the 'German nasties" will contact them in their search for information."

After the meeting Sadie and Tony had a little chat, and they decided that they could continue their discussions over dinner later. It was about 7.30 when Tony opened the door to a ravishing looking Sadie standing there looking seductively at him. She was wearing civilian clothes and she was looking absolutely lovely. She was wearing a long black evening dress with a silver fox fur and she had her hair tied back in a sort of a bun at the back. He got a whiff of exotic perfume as she passed him.