And indeed, Britain came in "second" to the U.S. In securing rocket technology, and moreover, "British rocket experts simply handed over to U.S. intelligence officers nearly 90% of their target intelligence and received little in return" (Dorril 137). This was a failure of enormous import.
On page 139, Dorril goes on to discuss the MI6 mission to gather German nuclear intelligence and in April 1945, the British - this time not allowing the Americans to step in ahead of them - smartly brought ten captured German nuclear scientists back to England and placed them in a country house near Cambridge. The house was wired and so all the conversations between the "Uranium Club" scientists were captured and became useful intelligence. This was a successful operation. It felt good for the British to succeed at this level whereas they had failed so miserably with the rocket intelligence vis-a-vis the United States.
On page 145, Dorril introduces the strategy that the MI6 pursued called BACKFIRE, a code-name for the "complete technical analysis of the V-2 rockets" that the British held;...
But the best of the German scientists went to Russia and America. And while MI6 agents had spent "months scouring France and Germany" looking for sufficient numbers of V-2 parts to reassemble rockets for testing, they failed at that task. "Inevitably, BACKFIRE was something of a damp squib," Dorril explains on page 145, and as a result, Britain had basically "lost the missile race to the Americans and to the Soviets." Moreover, when the MI6 believed it had recruited an important Russian scientist in 1948, the head of the Soviet Reparations Mission in Bremen, Colonel J.D. Tasoev (Dorril 146), much to British embarrassment, Tasoev "changed his mind almost as soon as he landed in London."
Works Cited
Dorril, Stephen. MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service.
London: The Free Press, 2000.
Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service (London: The Free Press, 2000), 10.
