Desmond Morton (civil servant)

Sir Desmond John Falkiner Morton KCB , CMG , MC (born November 13, 1891 in London , † July 31, 1971 in London ) was a British officer, secret service and civil servant. He held a prominent position as Winston Churchill's intelligence advisor and personal assistant in the early stages of World War II .

Life

Morton was the only child of the Royal Dragoons' officer, Colonel Charles Falkiner Morton, and his wife Edith Harriet, nee Leather, at 9 Hyde Park Gate in the upscale Kensington district of London . He was trained at Eton College and the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and then joined the Royal Field Artillery as a Second Lieutenant in 1911 . In September 1911 he began a course at the School of Gunners in Shoeburyness and was transferred to his unit in Sheffield in 1913 , where he was promoted to lieutenant in July 1914 .

First World War

After the outbreak of World War I, his brigade was shipped to France on August 17, 1914 as part of the 3rd Division of the British Expeditionary Force , where Morton experienced his first combat action in the Battle of Mons . He served on the Western Front until he was seriously wounded in 1917 and took part in several major battles, such as the Second Battle of Flanders in 1915 and the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He said he met Winston Churchill, who was then in command of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers , for the first time Early in 1916. In the same year he converted to Catholicism . In March 1917, when he was in command of an advanced battery at Arras , he was hit in the chest by an enemy machine gun bullet that barely missed the main artery and could not be operated on.

After several months of hospitalization in Great Britain, he returned to the service in July 1917 and became one of four aides-de-camp of the Commander in Chief on the Western Front, Sir Douglas Haig . In this position he developed his first contacts in the world of intelligence services and became better acquainted with people like Edward Spears , the liaison officer to the French army, and Philip Sassoon , the private secretary of Haig. He also met his future superiors Mansfield Smith-Cumming and Stewart Menzies , both future chiefs of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS and MI6), and met frequently with Churchill, who was now Minister of Munitions . After the end of the war, Morton stayed at Haig's headquarters in France until April 1919 and also accompanied the minister on his visits to the Paris peace conference . His highest rank was that of a major .

Interwar period

In April 1919, Morton was transferred to the MI1c section of the War Office , which would later become the MI6. As a cover for his work in the secret service, he got a job with the Foreign Office . In Section V he was responsible for anti-Bolshevik operations in Eastern Europe and was in contact with agents such as Sidney Reilly , Alexander Orlow , Paul Dukes and Malcolm Maclaren , among others . He was also involved in the 1924 affair surrounding the so-called Zinoviev letter . In 1931 his department was closed and Morton was appointed head of the newly formed Industrial Intelligence Center (IIC). This was spun off from the SIS in 1934. Morton remained head of the IIC until 1939 when the Ministry of Economic Warfare was established after the start of World War II . During this time he provided Winston Churchill, who was politically sidelined, with information about German rearmament, for example, and assisted him in his writing, in particular the work The World Crisis (he lived only a mile from Churchill's Chartwell estate ). He also corresponded closely with Maurice Hankey , Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defense .

Second World War

Morton worked as a secretary for the Ministry of Economic Warfare from 1939 until Churchill brought him to his private office in May 1940 after he took office. Here he initially had an important role as a middleman between Churchill and the Center for Deciphering Enemy Messages in Bletchley Park . He also acted as a liaison between Churchill and the governments-in-exile of the allied states installed in London . Morton was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of covert operations in occupied Europe, for which purpose the Special Operations Executive was established in 1940 under the control of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. As the war progressed, Churchill increasingly relied on his top military advisers and the extensive reconnaissance equipment available to them, which diminished Morton's role. He was promoted to Knight Commander in the Order of the Bath in 1945 , having been Companion since 1941 . Since 1937 he was Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George . After the war he also received the Croix de guerre with palm trees, the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honor and the Grand Officer's Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau .

After 1945

From 1946 to 1949, Morton represented his country in the Tripartite Gold Commission and the Inter-Allied Reparation Agency (IARA) in Brussels . In 1949 he was deputy head of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission in the Middle East. From 1950 until his retirement in 1953 he worked for the Ministry of Civil Aviation and for the Treasury . In retirement he lived in the London borough of Kew and was involved in hospitals in Hammersmith . He died at Hammersmith Postgraduate Hospital in the summer of 1971 at the age of 79 .

In the 2002 television movie Churchill - The Gathering Storm , Morton is played by Jim Broadbent .

literature

• Gill Bennett: Churchill's Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence. Routledge, 2006, ISBN 978-0-415-39430-7 .
• Ronald Lewin: Morton, Sir Desmond John Falkiner (1891–1971) , in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2004; Online edition, January 2008.