Tom Whipple@whippletom
Jun 27
21 tweets
This is the story of one of the greatest intelligence coups in history. It begins in the lobby of the Hotel Bristol in Oslo, one wintry night in 1939.
A middle aged man went to reception and asked, could he borrow a typewriter? 
amazon.co.uk/Battle-Beams-s
amazon.co.uk/Battle-Beams-s 
The man was Hans Ferdinand Mayer, a German businessman with the sort of boringly-corporate job that rarely invited further questions. He had arranged his work trip here, in the months before the invasion of Norway, especially.
He put on gloves, went upstairs, and began to type.
It seems unlikely that any of those in the lobby that night noticed him. Less likely still that they realised they had witnessed perhaps the most significant act of treachery of the war.
Mayer was head of the Siemens research laboratory, and he hated the Nazis.
He hated them emotionally. But also intellectually. He just could not understand their belief that Jews were inferior. It was morally wrong, but also absurd. It was "such nonsense".
His worries had been growing, as slowly his work moved from civil to military. "This meant war."
So over two nights he wrote everything he knew. The scope of what crossed his desk was dizzying. He wrote about the bomber program, and the tactics used for taking Polish fortifications. He talked of remote control gliders and guided rockets.
He mentioned a device to spot enemy aircraft using radio waves - at a time the British still assumed only they had radar.
He talked of radio-navigation, to provide precision bombing guidance - at a time when British bombers still navigated using the stars.
As an extra gift, he attached a small device to it. A proximity fuse. Proximity fuses were small and unglamorous devices attached to anti-aircraft shells that would prove to be among the most important advances of the war. They meant anti-aircraft guns actually worked.
To hit an aircraft you have to set the height for the shell to explode, then aim several miles ahead of it. You had to be precisely right in three dimensions. How did you do it? You didn't. At the start of the war they did more for morale than the military.
A proximity fuse changed that. It made it a 2D problem, not 3D. It went off in proximity to large metal objects.
Mayer bundled it all together and dropped it off at the British embassy, with a request. If it had been received, would the BBC be so kind as to change the greeting at the start of its World Service broadcast to ‘Hello, hello, this is London calling’
On the evening of 20 November, from across the North Sea came a crackly voice, the voice that in the grim years to come would remind him another Germany was possible. ‘Hello,’ it said, ‘hello, this is London calling.’
Later in the war, his habit of listening to the BBC would result in his arrest. But the story of how he survived, and kept his secret for decades, is a different one. The Oslo Report had been received. What happened next? It was - almost - ignored.
British intelligence considered it just too good to be true. So the logic went, it was ‘planted by a wily enemy’, who made sure that the few checkable facts were true – so that they would foolishly believe all the rest.
But one man, R V Jones, did take notice. And it was enough - he headed scientific counterintelligence.
Later in the war he would solve the conundrum of who Mayer was, and they would speak across the old divide.
During the war, he treated the report as a cheat code for his job. ‘In the few dull moments of the War I used to look up the Oslo report to see what should be coming along next.’
If you've got this far, I write about this in my book - 99p on Kindle today
amazon.co.uk/Battle-Beams-s
And...the obligatory post....available to all good foreign publishers for foreign rights!
Tom Whipple@whippletom
Jun 28
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To all the MANY (3) US people asking RE: the below why my book isn't available, I urge you to begin a concerted letter writing campaign to US publishers, explaining why they should contact my agent immediately.
Here are my other threads on the book
x.com/whippletom/sta
Tom Whipple@whippletom
Jun 22
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On the longest night of the year, I'm thinking of a mad Dane called Thomas Sneum, 83 years ago, 1,000ft up above the North Sea, climbing out onto the wing of his antique biplane.
In a war notable for daring escapes, his strikes me as among the most daring - and consequential 1/
Tom Whipple@whippletom
Jun 06
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80 years ago, a great armada left Britain for France. In the sky, swarms of planes took off in the gloaming, bound for the Reich.
Both were the result of months of planning, carrying technology years in development.
And they're not what you are thinking of. 1/x
Tom Whipple
@whippletom
Science at The Times - Tweets in personal capacity. My book: about boffins, derring do and the radio war https://t.co/za2mmy25r5
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