Claude Dansey

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Sir Claude Dansey

Born 1876
Died 11 June 1947
Occupation Army officer; SIS officer; head of the Z Organisation; Assistant Chief and later Vice Chief of SIS

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey (1876 – 11 June 1947) was a British intelligence officer who ran SIS's Z Organisation and was Assistant Chief and then Vice Chief of SIS during the Second World War.[1][2]

Claude Dansey was an MI6 officer. He was appointed Assistant Chief of the Secret Service (ACSS) in 1940.[3]

Early career

Keith Jeffery describes Dansey as coming from a family of English country squires. For health reasons he was moved as a boy from Wellington to a British boys' school in Bruges, where he was seduced by Robert "Robbie" Ross. He served in the British South Africa Police during the Matabele rising of 1896, as a colonial policeman in Borneo, and as a lieutenant in the South African War of 1899–1902. From 1904 to 1909 he was a colonial political officer in Somaliland. He later worked as resident secretary of a country club in upstate New York.[4] Nigel West adds that he fought in the Matabele campaign at the age of twenty and made a number of influential friends in Manhattan.[5]

During the First World War Dansey worked for Vernon Kell's organisation, the forerunner of MI5. Philip Davies identifies him as the Major C. E. Dansey who, as late as 1917, was in charge of MI5c, the section responsible for military policy on the control of civilian passenger traffic.[6] He joined Mansfield Cumming on 20 August 1917, aged forty-one.[4] In the functional reorganisation Cumming proposed that year, Dansey was to handle military matters. Stewart Menzies later succeeded him as head of Military Section IV.[6][7]

Rome and the Z Organisation

Dansey worked for Cumming from 1917 to 1919. He rejoined the service as head of the Rome station in April 1931 and stayed until March 1936.[8] In 1936 Sir Hugh Sinclair set up the Z Organisation, an agent-running network for intelligence on Germany and Italy. Jeffery describes it as run by "the able but extremely acerbic" Dansey and deliberately kept separate from the rest of SIS. Its headquarters were in Bush House, under business cover as the export department of Geoffrey Duveen & Co.[8] One of his first officers, Kenneth Cohen, was interviewed by Dansey in a car on The Mall in 1937.[8]

West writes that Dansey drew on a wide circle of friends, including William Wiseman and Alexander Korda. Korda's film company provided cover, and Dansey later became one of its directors. To most of his colleagues he was known as "Uncle Claude".[5] West also reports a rumour, which began around 1934, that Sinclair had got rid of Dansey for financial mismanagement. He suggests that this may have been true or may have been cover for setting up Z.[5] Davies says that Dansey was notionally dismissed as Rome passport control officer to create the cover.[9] Davies also notes two explanations of Z's origins. Dansey's biographers say he proposed it after anti-Nazi contacts in the Abwehr warned him that the Hague station was penetrated. Christopher Andrew suggests instead that it grew out of Dansey's contacts in British business.[9] Unusually for SIS at the time, Z trained its officers in clandestine communications and brought in a retired Scotland Yard officer to teach countersurveillance.[9]

The succession in 1939

When the war began, Sinclair merged Z with the passport control network, and Dansey ran the organisation from Geneva.[10] Sinclair died on 4 November 1939, just as the Venlo incident was coming to a head.[10] The sources differ on Dansey's ambitions. West says he was in Lausanne saying goodbye to the Z staff, seemingly confident that he would be the new Chief.[5] Davies writes that he saw himself as the most senior and best-qualified candidate and returned to Britain to pursue the post. Once he saw he could not get it, Davies says, he backed Menzies.[10] Jeffery cites the ambassador in Paris, Sir Ronald Campbell, who told Alexander Cadogan that Dansey did not want the job and admitted he was too old for it. Dansey was then sixty-three. Cadogan spoke to him on 16 November.[11]

Assistant Chief and Vice Chief

Under Menzies, Dansey came to London as Assistant Chief (ACSS) while continuing to run Z. He took control of all agents run from London and of the Italian and Swiss stations.[11] Davies writes that his relations with the Deputy Chief, Valentine Vivian, were poor, and that Kim Philby described Vivian as "mortally afraid" of him. Others described Dansey as a pillar of strength in the organisation.[10] Although he had a reputation as a poor team player, his memorandum to Menzies of 1 May 1941 urged SIS to work on friendly terms with the Special Operations Executive: "I for one counsel Collaboration." Menzies accepted his proposal that disputes between the two services be referred to Dansey.[11]

At Broadway, Dansey's first reaction to the Venlo disaster was to blame John Hooper, a former Hague station employee. West writes that Dansey wanted to "eliminate" him, but Vivian intervened, pointing out that there was no direct evidence against Hooper.[5]

Dansey became Vice Chief (VCSS) in October 1942. On 29 March 1943 General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall was made ACSS to understudy the sixty-seven-year-old Dansey, who nevertheless kept control of French operations.[12] Dansey distrusted the Americans. According to Michael Smith, he saw them as inexperienced and gullible and blocked attempts by the Office of Strategic Services to run independent agents into occupied western Europe.[13] In 1943 he warned that Allen Dulles in Switzerland had been fed German disinformation over a compromised cypher.[14] Smith records that Dansey was eventually diverted to other work, while Menzies stressed the need for harmonious collaboration with the OSS.[15] Patrick Reilly later judged that Menzies was never able to impose himself on his mutually antagonistic chief assistants, Dansey and Vivian.[16]

External Resources

Notes

  1. ↑ Who Was Who, Oxford University Press, "Dansey, Lt-Col Sir Claude Edward Marjoribanks, (1876–11 June 1947)", doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u224437.
  2. ↑ Claude Edward Dansey, Lives of the First World War, Imperial War Museums. Exact birth dates given elsewhere differ (IWM: 10 September 1876; the Bibliothèque nationale de France: 21 October 1876).
  3. ↑ Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, Bloomsbury, 2011, p.343.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, ch. 2.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Nigel West, MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations, 1909–1945, Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2019 (first published 1983), ch. 6.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Philip H. J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2004, ch. 2.
  7. ↑ Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, ch. 5.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, ch. 9.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Philip H. J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2004, ch. 3.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Philip H. J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, Abingdon: Frank Cass, 2004, ch. 4.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, ch. 10.
  12. ↑ Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, ch. 14.
  13. ↑ Michael Smith, The Real Special Relationship, New York: Arcade Publishing, 2023, ch. 3.
  14. ↑ Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, ch. 15.
  15. ↑ Michael Smith, The Real Special Relationship, New York: Arcade Publishing, 2023, ch. 4.
  16. ↑ Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, ch. 22.
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