British Baltic Fishery Protection Service
The British Baltic Fishery Protection Service ( BBFPS ; German: Britischer Ostsee-Fischereischutzdienst ) was a front organization of the British secret service MI6 , which officially belonged to the Royal Navy . It was founded in 1949 - officially to monitor the maritime borders of the British zone of occupation in the Baltic Sea , but actually to carry out secret operations in the Baltic Sea area.
Personnel and equipment
The core of the BBFPS was the so-called Schnellbootgruppe Klose , a naval unit with German crews and speedboats from the Second World War . The name was derived from its commander Hans-Helmut Klose . The BBFPS was headed by a British officer, and the organization's headquarters changed several times between Hamburg and Kiel .
The group originally only consisted of two German Kriegsmarine type 38 speed boats , S-208 and S-130 , built at the Lürssen shipyard in Vegesack and delivered to Great Britain in 1945 , which were used by the Royal Navy for testing and trial purposes as Experimental Craft FPB 5208 and FPB 5130 had been put into service. The two boats were converted for their new task in England and Germany. Since they were not supposed to conduct combat operations, the armament was removed. Instead, devices for electronic reconnaissance , dinghies for landing agents and, on FPB 5208, a balloon launch system with observation devices came on board. In 1954, the Schnellbootgruppe received two more boats of the later herring gull class , which had originally been built for the border patrol sea , but were then objected to by the Allied Control Commission due to their high speed (approx. 43 knots) and confiscated by the British .
tasks
Under the code name Operation Jungle , the speedboat group initially mainly carried out smuggling and dropped Baltic emigrants as British agents on the Baltic and Polish coasts. These agents operated in Baltic partisan groups against Soviet rule. Some of the agents were brought in with balloons. The boats waited with the agents in front of Bornholm for the mission order, and then under cover of night the coast of the Baltic Soviet republics to drop the agents off or, in some cases, to pick them up again.
At first this route seemed very successful, so that from 1953 US agents also used this British "transport route". In retrospect, however, the success of the operations is controversial. They were canceled in 1955 because agents had been betrayed and arrested after they landed. From 1951 the boats were used more and more often for reconnaissance tasks in the Baltic Sea , with electronic reconnaissance playing an important role. It provided valuable information about the reconstruction of the Soviet Baltic fleet , about which very little was otherwise known in the West.
Dissolution and whereabouts
After the establishment of the Bundeswehr , the two boats from the war were handed over to the Bundesmarine in 1955, where they were converted and used as school boats. In 1956 the Schnellbootgruppe Klose was dissolved and the three newbuildings were also put into service as the herring gull class (class 149) for the German Navy. Since most of the crews were also taken over, the Schnellbootgruppe formed the basis of the 1st Schnellbootgeschwader (also Schnellbootlehrgeschwader ) and the navy's telecommunications intelligence organization.
References
See also
literature
- Sigurd Hess : The "British Baltic Fishery Protection Service" and the "Schnellgruppe Klose" 1949-1956 , in: Hartmut Klüver (ed.): Stations of German Navy History (II): German Sea Associations 1945-1956 (Lectures of the 2nd Forum Wilhelmshaven for History of marine and shipping from November 3-4, 2000), Düsseldorf 2001, pp. 75–93.
- Stephen Dorril : MI 6 - Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service , New York 2000.
- Armin Müller: Wave War. Agent radio and radio intelligence of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945-1968 , Berlin (Ch. Links Verlag) 2017. ISBN 3-86153-947-0 . ISBN 978-3-86153-947-6
Literary processing
- The secret companion of John Le Carré describes Operation Jungle from the agent leader's point of view in one episode
Movie and TV
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ FPB = Fast Patrol Boat
- ^ British Military Powerboat Trust [1]
- ↑ Info page on German maritime associations 1945–1956 Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Sigurd Hess, Die Schnellbootgruppe Klose and the British Baltic Fishery Protection Service (BBFPS), p. 4 Archived copy ( memento of the original from February 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Sigurd Hess, ibid. P. 5 Archived copy ( Memento of the original from January 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
