Room 3603, my article here: http://www.psywar.org/sibs.php may be of interest to you. I'd certainly be interested to know who your Great Uncle was? A former journalist by chance? Lee
Room 3603, my article here: HTTP Error 403 may be of interest to you. I'd certainly be interested to know who your Great Uncle was? A former journalist by chance? Lee Warm greetings Lee and thanks for taking the trouble to stop by and paste up your message and link here, it's very much appreciated. Where to start? Fact is, for the past few years or so, I've been blindly pedalling along on my own researches into my Great Uncles activities within D/Q section and elsewhere, in a parallel universe to your own. Trouble is, i’m aware now that I picked the wrong universe to keep pedalling in. Que Sera. Amazing coincidence - I hoovered up the very same page you very kindly linked me to here, a couple of years ago and thence saved it into a vast folder of stuff I was accumulating for ‘further reading and inspection’ later. All this while I was trying to get an early grip on the whole lingo and wider activities of SOE, BSC, PWE, SIS, D/Q section et all. But at the time I only skimmed over it, and anyway, even if I’d read it thoroughly back then, I would have missed the significance of much of the text and content in your narrative, as I wasn’t possessed of the wider knowledge, key words and phrases that I am now. Ho hum. I stumbled across this site just a couple of days ago, and it didn’t take long to come across some of your threads and communiqués, which produced a big note on my desk here which says ‘Contact PsyWar ASAP’. My intention being since yesterday, to pop a post to you summarising my Great Uncles CV, and my theories as to what his primary initial role within SOE’s D/Q.51 section mission to South America and so on, may have actually been. On top of which, and most importantly of all, I’ve now fully read (twice) your fascinating article link here, which has seemingly solved a major riddle for me concerning ‘Britanova’, as well as put me right back on course with all my researching on my Great Uncle - ‘Cornelius James Murphy’ - and his mission to Buenos Aires in August 1941. All very exciting again for me personally, and for which you have my honest and sincere thanks. So yes Lee, to answer your original question, my Great Uncle was a political affairs foreign correspondent with Reuters. Born 1894 – Died 1960. Multi lingual, mostly French, Flemish, Italian, Spanish & Portuguese. Served with B.M.I. and the RFC throughout WW1. Joined Reuters 1920. Had his ticket to fly on the R101 cancelled by Reuters at the very last minute in 1930 – what a lucky bunny. Appointed chief correspondent Paris in 1936. Flew to South America on Hindenburg in 1936. Spanish civil war 1937. Reuters bureau chief in Rome 1938/40 (spent a lot of time getting to know the dodgy Cardinals at the Vatican). It is believed that by now he was already working with SIS as well as Reuters. Joined ‘de Gaule’ on Ark Royal for two months for the failed raid on Dakar in Sept 1940 and later helped translate de Gaule’s memoirs. Chief correspondent Gibraltar till Jan 1941. Reuters bureau chief in Lisbon till June 1941. Resigned from 22 years with Reuters and flew home to join SOE’s D/Q.51 branch in July 41. His PF file ref is HS9/1077/7 and his SOE number was 2900. He was recommended to SOE via ‘Greenwood of Britanova’. There ya go! Shipped out to Buenos Aires and then Brazil on a forged Irish passport in Sept 1941 under a legend of working as a correspondent for the Hulton Press, on a highly secret black propaganda mission. Travelled up through South America and eventually Louisiana, via the Caribbean, then on to Washington and New York, returning home to the UK via Canada in July 1942 and then officially signed off from SOE in August 42. In Sept 42, he flew off to Lisbon again and thence on to Rio, for exactly who and about what is still unknown, although evidence is now being uncovered that confirms he was with both SO-2 and the BSC in their central Americas section - eventually returning to the UK in spring 1943, after which he joined the Intelligence Corps with the rank of Captain, and became an interrogator of POW’s till wars end. Shipped off to south east Europe again after the war before being appointed P.R.O. to the Brussels Treaty Org in 1949, until it morphed into NATO in 1951. In 1953 he joined Ian Flemings seemingly CIA/SIS funded ‘Mercury News’ global spy ring organisation at Kemsley House, which hid itself deep inside the ink wells of The Sunday Times, with the title of ‘Leader Writer – Foreign Affairs’...and so on it goes. Interestingly, I’ve had a few lengthy dialogues with the very helpful chief archivist at Reuters, who has himself had a lot of career experience with the intelligence communities. Over a period of some months, he became quite caught up in his searches for information on Cornelius and yet came up with nothing on him at all, even though I already had clear evidence that he’d worked there for 22 years and had held executive positions as a foreign correspondent for five years. His final conclusion was that all reference to him had been comprehensively and very thoroughly ‘wiped’ from all their records in years long past, by parties unknown. My theory is that Cornelius was one of the South American courier agents involved with what I believe was a master deception plan, devised and run by H. Montgomery Hyde in league with William Stephenson’s BSC and others, to contrive the apparent stealing of a Nazi propaganda map from a German agent in Buenos Aires, of Hitler’s proposed new territorial make up of the South American continent, under Nazi rule. The sole purpose of the mission being to present Roosevelt with the unequivocal (albeit forged) evidence he needed to convince the more influential liberal middle class isolationist circles and wider U.S. electorate that Hitler was in fact a very real and dangerous threat to the USA’s southern borders, and thus America should immediately fall in fully with Britain and Churchill and save our bacon – without further delay. And then as history shows, Japan entered from stage right by bombing Pearl Harbour in the final hours of 1941 and thus inadvertantly gave us back our bacon anyway. Apologies for the lengthy nature of this lot on this occasion Lee, but I’m sure you’ll have managed to just skip and yawn your way to the key elements of interest to you here, even if it’s just the first and last paragraphs! Laugh!! If you haven’t already drifted off into a deep coma by now, I would be truly delighted to hear your thoughts and views, based on all the wider, additional knowledge you already possess, and if you think I’m talking a lot of tosh with my theorising you must say so Lee. Mine is a quest for fact, not romanticised fiction or similar fanciful conspiracy theories. There it is. Thanks again – Phil.
P.S. I'll send you a PM Lee alerting you to the above response just in case you're not on the auto notification alert. Phil.
A very interesting post Phil and you've obviously done very well trying to research the elusive D/Q section of SOE. (Mods, would it be possible to split out these posts into a new thread? Perhaps titled "SOE D/Q and Press Propaganda"?) As you've probably discovered, D/Q are still one of the big secrets of SOE and the war in general. There are few of their files at the National Archives and most of these are very heavily redacted. Basically what we know is that D/Q was the press propaganda section of SOE responsible for "secret journalism" for the purposes of propaganda, deception, and economic warfare. It often seems to be overlooked that SOE were directly responsible to the Minister of Economic Warfare and this was one of their important roles, especially early in the war. D/Q was mostly staffed with journalists stationed all around the world, particularly in the neutral countries of Europe, North America, South America, and the Middle East. Their job was to obtain favourable press coverage by methods such as setting up news agencies (Britanova, Allied Correspondents and others), setting up their own newspapers, financing failing newspapers or bribing editors and their journalists. They had their own circle of friendly journalists that could be relied upon to place stories in the media. Other news agencies seemed particularly favourable to disseminate anything D/Q gave them, like the Overseas News Agency – stories from this agency often appear in the provincial U.S. press. One thing they were working on in 1941 and particularly in South America was an economic warfare campaign against the giant German petro-chemical corporation I G Farben. Apparently this went as far as doctoring I G Farben products and spreading malicious rumours about the company. Spreading rumours was one of their responsibilities and the one part of their activities that is revealed in the archives. In this respect they worked closely with the Political Warfare Executive for propaganda rumours. They spread far more important deception rumours as well. There were also suggestions of fitting up certain German or pro-German persons by planting incriminating false documents on them. Regarding Cornelius, I really can't say whether he was involved in the sort of activity in South America as you suspect but it is not outside the bounds of possibility. I seem to recall their was a big push to establish Britanova in South America in 1941, especially after Allied Correspondents was shut down and the organisation passed to the Ministry of Information under a new name. D/Q.51 would have been Conelius's SOE symbol or code name (like 007 for James Bond) so wasn’t a sub section of D/Q as such. Actually the symbol usually represents a particular post rather than a particular person. Just as a number of actors have played 007, there could have been one or more D/Q.51s. I've tried in the past to get some of D/Qs archive released but I do not believe it is going to happen any time soon, especially in the current political climate as far as the relationship between the Government and Press is concerned. In some respects it might be better that these particular secrets stay secret. Lee
Thanks for your help Lee, tis much appreciated. The whole dummy News Agency thing is a fascinating subject in its own right. Between the wars, Reuters News Agency became the de facto voice of the British Government and thus Empire. No small wonder then that the Government spent a number of years leading up to the war quietly trying to manipulate the removal of its elitist chairman Sir Roderick Jones, which they finally succeeded in achieving during early 1941, with fortuitously impressive good timing. Talk about ‘don’t believe everything you read in the papers’. I often wonder how the democratic world would actually be structured today, and who would be sharing beds with who if the vast majority of the free worlds electorates were able to divine the real facts from the fiction in the media. As a funny aside…I’ve spent the last two and a half years trying to find further reference to his hand written reference on his SOE P/F CR form which appears to say “Recommended by: ‘Greenwood of Roitanova’”. In other words, I’ve tried breaking that word ‘Roitanova’ (and variations of it) and its etymology down in so many ways you wouldn’t believe it. Sad really. Came up with some obtuse references for it in Madrid and Yugoslavia, after which I started targeting SOE’s Major Eric Greenwood who operated with the partisans in Yugoslavia and so on, and so on. You can see where all this was leading. Yup…Zilch Ville. Until the other day when I re-read your PsyOrg article – properly – this time, and espied your reference to the word ‘Britanova’. Duhhh! I wouldn't have even made it as a janitors assistant at Bletchley would I. Don’t you just love those moments! One of the many rich rewards for me in carrying out research into heavily camouflaged people such as CJM here, is the huge long journey it takes you on, and all the diverse, off piste places you wind up inside every week, even if you never actually manage to set eyes on signs of your own Holy Grail. His ‘D/Q 51’ number resonates slightly mockingly with its other better known numerical cousin, namely: ‘Area 51’. Thanks for the mention of the I.G.Farben thing. I’ll sniff over that one. When I was up at Kew, I dug out and photographed a whole bunch of other SOE, social, political and economic report docs, concerning the like state and mood of many of the South American countries for the first half of the war. There is much mention of industry, the key players and the middle classes etc, suggesting where their leanings were and how they should be manipulated. Worryingly, the German team was widely judged to have been accepted as the undisputed good guys to get into bed with for future stability and affluence. The Brits on the other hand were often viewed as selfish, too controlling, aloof and commercially boring. It’s becoming more and more apparent now that the only serious weapon we had to stay the Argentinean Junta from pulling off a massive Nazi sponsored coo throughout all the South American countries, was black propaganda en masse. It was clearly a very close run thing for a few years down there. Churchill was said to be truly terrified at the prospect of Nazi rule in South America and many of the reports underline our critical need to preserve our ocean supply routes of bully beef and other essential food stocks. It had become a desperate case of “If we want to eat, we’re going to need to sing a lot of very big lies down there.” Samba under the Swastika very nearly became more of a shiver than a shimmy. I don’t have a copy of H.Montgomery Hyde’s 1962 book ‘Room 3603’, which focuses on a lot of this stuff as well as other BSC/SOE black propaganda activities in north and south America. Question: Has anybody read it? If so, does it reference any of their activity in South America? Phil.
