Radio Security Service

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Radio Security Service (abbreviated RSS or RSS , German  as "wireless security" ) was in the Second World War a mainly by amateur radio -based British military intelligence . The main task was to intercept and record the enemy, in particular the German radio traffic, and thus to support the War Office Y Groups (WOYG) , the radio eavesdropping stations of the British War Ministry , also known as Y Service ( German  "Funkabhördienst" ).

history

Few radio amateurs had such quality radio receiver as the HRO of the National Radio Company . Instead, they mostly used simple self-made receivers .
Sound sample of a secret Morse transmission

The RSS was founded as an organization at the beginning of the war, in 1939. In his capacity as an employee of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) , Lord Sandhurst (1892-1964) asked the then President of the Radio Society of Great Britain RSGB , Arthur Watts, for support from the many radio amateurs in the country .

The new organization was assigned to MI8 , the DMI department responsible for radio reconnaissance . The then major and later Colonel ( Colonel ) J. P. G. Worlledge became the leader. The optional up to 1500 serving as hams were Voluntary interceptors (VI) , German as "volunteer eavesdropper" referred to. They made a major contribution to the British war effort.  

The original aim was to help locate and identify enemy, mostly German, spies and agents who were operating in the United Kingdom. The VIs also received other radio transmissions, for example from German submarines operating in the North Sea or the North Atlantic , and forwarded these to the responsible military authorities. Since the radio messages were usually encrypted using the Enigma machine , they were forwarded to the Arkley View central military office for analysis . From there they went on to Bletchley Park (BP), where they could almost always be deciphered . The hundreds of intercepted radio messages every day were a valuable aid to the BP Codebreakers in breaking the Enigma-encrypted German military communications.

In May 1941 both MI8 and the Radio Security Service RSS assigned to it went into the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 . The activities of the RSS did not become public until 1979.

Web links

  • The Radio Security Service by Dirk Rijmenants, 2008, English.
  • The Secret Listeners (English)
  • Documentary of the BBC through the RSS (about 30 min., English)
  • RSS Log Sheet Listening log as they were produced by the thousands every day
  • Photo of an Eddystone All World Two amateur radio receiver , as it was inexpensive to obtain as a kit and was used by many VIs at the time
  • John Swartz: Voluntary Interceptors tribute at the RSGB National Radio Center. RSGB magazine RadCom, September 2018, thersgb.org (PDF; 182 kB) with photo by Arthur Watts
  • Commemorative plaque unveiled in 2013 by the Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, in honor of the 1,500 radio amateurs who served their country as Voluntary Interceptors
  • David P. Mowry: Cryptologic Aspects of German Intelligence Activities in South America during World War II. Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency , www.nsa.gov (PDF; 8.2 MB), English

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Radio Security Service , accessed June 3, 2019.
  2. ↑ Origins of the Radio Security Service , accessed June 3, 2019.
  3. ↑ The Secret Listeners , accessed June 3, 2019.