Britain's intelligence agency MI5 bugged phones of civil servants during World War II to uncover whether they were carelessly revealing wartime secrets
LONDON: Britain's intelligence agency MI5 bugged phones of civil servants during World War II to uncover whether they were carelessly revealing wartime secrets during their conversations, according to declassified documents.
Conversations between Whitehall bureaucrats and large armament contractors about shipments as well as calls to their family members were recored during the war by Britain's Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department of Information Ministry at the behest of MI5, 'The Daily Telegraph' reported.
"You get some sense of Whitehall working at full tilt and people working under pressure and some of conversations are very tense to say the least. It's the sort of dialogue you are used to seeing on films, but this is it for real," Mark Dunton of National Archives was quoted as saying.
Some of the recorded conversations also included tense conversations between worried relatives of the civil servants calling each other as German bombs fell on London in 1943.
For example -- one man called a woman in Sanderstead on January 20, 1943, saying: "Hope you are not frightened darling, now the raids have started. They came over the house just now, people dived into shops, frightening business."
She also said that a "lorry full" of "invasion food", including bully beef and biscuits, had arrived for the street. Residents were being asked to keep a room empty to store it.
One Dr TR Merton of the Ministry of Production was heard talking to a Dr EG Hill asking for "some phosphorescent powder which did nothing until it came into contact with infa-red" needed for "a particular job".
The bugging caused tension between Whitehall and MI5, with Sir Edward Bridges of the War Cabinet Office describing the plan in one secret memo as "a most awful waste of time".
However, it discovered no serious security breaches and a report afterwards concluded: "It would appear that in no individual case was any matter of outstanding importance discussed and that from the security standpoint, nearly all the speakers were very guarded in their remarks."
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