Minutes of the fifty-fourth Meeting of the sub-committee, held in the Secretary's Room, Great George Street, S.W.1. on Friday, 19th October, 1943 at 11.00 am

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Minutes of the fifty-fourth Meeting of the sub-committee, held in the Secretary's Room, Great George Street, S.W.1. on Friday, 19th October, 1943 at 11.00 am

arrangements governing the use of W/T by the Allied Nations (other than U.S.A.), and pointing out that, generally speaking, security in the sense of volumes of traffic, insecure call sign systems, etc. was of minor importance in the case of the Allies but that a much more serious and difficult problem was the use of insecure cyphers and codes. THE SUB-COMMITTEE:- (i) Agreed with the proposals set out in the Memorandum, except that paragraph 1.C. stating that the "use of W/T by the Allied Nations for diplomatic purposes was the responsibility of the Foreign Office" should be qualified by the addition of the words "as regards the granting of authority. But the Foreign Office and the Radio Security Service act jointly to secure control". (ii) Agreed that a paragraph should be added to the report at Item 1 above for the Chiefs of Staff, stating that the W/T Security Committee agreed with the recommendations of the Cypher Security Committee. MESSAGES FROM ENEMY WIRELESS STATIONS 3. THE SUB-COMMITTEE had before them a Minute by the Secretary (JIC/1711/43, dated 28th October, 1943) covering a letter from the Director of Military Intelligence, recommending that a standard drill should be laid down, common to all three Services, for the correct procedure to be followed when wireless stations in enemy territory tried to get into contact with us. He considered that the policy should be that exchanges should be confined as follows:- (a) All signals to be acknowledged. (b) The sender to be told that anything he wished to say would be reported to the proper authorities. (c) Appointments for further schedules might be made. (d) Nothing further might be passed beyond normal procedure of acknowledgements of messages transmitted by the enemy. explained that at present the procedure was that a service station receiving these messages acknowledged them and handed over to M.I.5. who investigated the probable genuineness of the sender. If the sender was considered to come into the category of a voluntary agent, M.I.5. passed him on to C. The problem was, however, what further action ought then to be taken. It should be noted that some accurate information has, in fact, been received in these messages. At present however, nothing more is done than to acknowledge receipt. It was agreed in discussion that important messages, for example, in connection with German collapse, might come in this way. It was considered that, when a message was received, -2-
Collection ID
CAB81
Conflict
Second World War
Document Reference
CAB 81/91/56
File Reference
CAB 81/91
Identifier
10.1080/swwf.cab81.0091.056
Keywords
Security Communications Interception Governments In Exile Wireless Communications
Pages
4
Published in
United Kingdom
Series
War Cabinet: Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee: Minutes (JIC Series).
Themes
Signals Intelligence and Code-breaking