Claude Dansey - Z Organization

Z Organization

While assigned as chief of station in Rome, Dansey noted several major weaknesses in MI6:

• Retired Admiral Hugh Sinclair, head of the agency, was "a half-mad paranoid who preferred to communicate with his people exclusively via messages left in a locked box--to which only his equally half-mad sister had the combination."
• MI6 had no information on Europe, which was about to erupt into World War II.
• The budget had been slashed extensively, so the agency drew its ranks from retired military personnel with pensions, who drew little or no salary, ensuring incompetence and lack of motivation.
• Even the lowliest taxi driver knew the head of MI6 operations in any given city was always the Passport Control Officer, which was Dansey's diplomatic cover as SIS officer in the British Embassy. "MI6 had been using this cover for years." As a result, the cover had long since been compromised, and no one was doing anything about it.

With this in mind, Dansey relied heavily on his American and industrialist contacts, as he felt businessmen knew more about intelligence gathering than the MI6 officers. They focused on the bottom line, ignoring the petty prejudices and favor-seeking that plagued the system at the time, travelled widely on their own dime, had intimate connections with other foreign businessmen and were their own experts.

Ultimately, Dansey was convinced what he saw was a disaster waiting to happen, so he set up a parallel MI6 structure, a hidden shadow network that could take over when the inevitable happened. By 1936, Dansey's Z Organization (after his own codename, Z) had over 200 executives, most doing it for the thrill of espionage. They were not allowed to take extreme risks, write anything down, take pictures or carry spy equipment. Alexander Korda used his company, London Films, as an excuse to visit sensitive areas while "searching for film locations". These businessmen and journalists used their own credentials as cover.

Meanwhile, Dansey was promoted to head the covert intelligence operations desk from its London headquarters. Then World War II broke out and the intelligence disaster Dansey predicted came to fruition.

The Hague was the major shipment point for MI6 operations at the time, gathering information from all over Europe and sending them to London. Unfortunately, it was headed by retired military officers Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, who had little intelligence experience. They had been penetrated by a Dutch asset, who was really working for the Nazi's SD and revealed the identities of all agents and assets. SD officer Walter Schellenberg posed as a military officer in the German underground, wishing to approach Best and Stevens, who snapped the bait and were captured at Venlo in September 1939. A few days later, the Nazis knew everything and the entire MI6 structure was destroyed.