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CHAPTER 6

The Blueprint Spies

Industrial mobilization and espionage

The design of new weapons, the quantities produced, their export to foreign powers and the capacity of munitions works to expand production were subjects for the War Office’s nineteenth-century Intelligence Division and for its counterparts across Europe. As early as 1865 two young men were dismissed from Armstrong’s naval shipyard and armaments factory in Newcastle for copying secret plans: ‘for some time past much annoyance has been felt from similar malpractices’, complained a director of Armstrong’s. Forty years later, when the naval shipyards at Kiel were ice-bound, Sir Trevor Dawson, the Edwardian naval ordnance director of the armaments company Vickers, skated round the docks, like a pleasure-seeker on a spree, making mental notes of what was visible. Arthur Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908), about secret submarine designs missing from Woolwich Arsenal, showed the increasing awareness of industrial espionage in a mechanized age. The earliest known intelligence report from SIS, issued in January 1910, concerned Vickers’s German counterpart, Krupp.¹

The crisis over the shortage of artillery shells in 1915, and general battle experiences during 1914–18, demonstrated that armaments manufacturing capacity was as important to victory as fighting manpower. ‘National armies cannot even be collected without the assistance of the whole modern machinery of national industry, still less equipped,’ wrote the first communist MP, Cecil L’Estrange Malone, after returning from his visit in 1919 to the Soviet Union. Russian revolutionaries knew they had to match the industrial potential of the British Empire, the USA, France and Germany, for ‘without equipment on the modern scale great armies are sheep for the slaughter’, Malone explained. ‘The next war will be won in the workshop,’ General Sir Noel (‘Curly’) Birch, Master General of Ordnance at the War Office turned director in charge of land armaments at Vickers, told Lord Milne, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in 1929. ‘If we are honest as a nation we must pay just as much attention to the industrial mobilisation for war as we do to our armed forces.’ If the productive capacity of British armaments companies continued to be depleted, as it had been for the ten years of attempted world disarmament, Birch asked, ‘where will be the force behind diplomacy?’²

Intelligence services exist to monitor risks. They amass, collate and analyse information covering the fluctuations of public opinion and national sentiments, they collect diplomatic and strategic secrets, they foster subversion and they practise counter-espionage; and more than ever after 1918, they have supplied industrial intelligence. The remit of British military attachés in Prague included the monitoring of the Škoda munitions works at Pilsen. In 1928 and 1929 James Marshall-Cornwall, then Military Attaché in Berlin, visited Sweden to inspect and report on the Bofors works, which had a working arrangement with Krupp as regards munitions and ordnance. Edwin (‘Eddy’) Boxshall, who was both SIS and Vickers representative in Bucharest, was a director with inside information on the privately owned Cop