Kenneth Cohen
Kenneth Herman Salaman Cohen was a British sailor and intelligence officer who served in both world wars. He was an officer of the Royal Navy who served as a cadet during World War I to see the Scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow. He would often say that he was "the first Jew in the Royal Navy." After specializing as a torpedo officer during Interwar Period, he "retired" at the rank of Lieutenant commander in 1935. His retirement was a smokescreen to join the Secret Intelligence Service. Before Britain had formally entered World War II, Cohen worked for Thomas Kendrick and Claude Dansey as Z-3, placed in charge of the London Branch of the Z Organisation as deputy director. In 1943, he became the lead SIS spymaster and case officer for the entire region of Western Europe. He was also the Chair of the Tripartite Planning Committee for Operation SUSSEX. After the war, he became SIS Director of Personnel, Controller for Eastern Europe, and the Director of Production. He retired from SIS in 1953, at the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the exposure of Kim Philby.
Away from the Secret Service, he became the European advisor to the United Steel Companies, serving here to oversee the company's transition into the European Common Market. In 1972, he became Vice President of the European League for Economic Cooperation, advocating heavily for Britain to join the European Union. He was also a member of the Garrick Club, a councillor for Chatham House, and was chair of the Franco-British Society.
Early life and career
Kenneth Cohen was born 15 March 1900 at 1 Lower Terrace, Branch Hill, Hampstead, London. Cohen's grandfather was James Hermann, a briefly-served Rabbi in Brighton who ran a boarding school for Jewish boys, and later became the President of the Middle Street Synagogue. Cohen's father was Herman Joseph Cohen, the first Jew to win the Hebrew Scholarship to the University of Oxford. Herman became a well-respected lawyer and barrister. Cohen's mother was Bessie Salaman.Early naval career
Kenneth Cohen was trained for four-and-a-half months as a "special entry" naval cadet in the waining days of World War I at Keyham College, where he was taught rigging, boat-sailing, and seamanship. At the time of his studies here, the captain of Keyham College was Herbert John Temple Marshall, who had been a captain since 1889 with the captaincy of nine naval vessels to that point, and demanded perfection from his students.Cohen missed out the bulk of the First World War while he was attending Keyham, but he wrote about its aftermath upon joining the crew of the HMS Iron Duke to meet the surrendering German High Seas Fleet at the Firth of Forth and Operation ZZ:
"Boarding parties were duly sent out to examine the victims—no-one could believe there would be no sign of resistance but there was none. It had been a magnificent spectacle and never since the days of the Persians can there have been such an endless spread of warships."After Operation ZZ, which was by that point the largest gathering of naval vessels in history, the Iron Duke accompanied the High Seas Fleet to Scapa Flow, where Cohen witnessed the Scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow.
Interwar Period
In 1926, Cohen joined the Torpedo Division. In 1932, Cohen graduated from RN Staff College and served as an interpreter in French and Russian. In 1935, he officially "retired" from the Royal Navy at the rank of Lieutenant commander.Z Organisation
At this time, in 1935, Kenneth Cohen was recruited into the Secret Intelligence Service – an organization which officially had never been publicly avowed, requiring him to have "retired" before joining so that he could be given an undercover posting. He was placed under the cover of a Passport Control Officer working for the British Foreign Office, a position created specifically for SIS officers deployed in foreign countries. He was soon appointed head of the Passport Control Office section for diplomatic delegations abroad.File:Claude Dansey.jpg|thumb|Claude Dansey, known Colonel Z, was the director of the Z Organisation.
A little into a year of his time at SIS, in 1936, Cohen was one of the very first officers recruited into the newly created Z Organisation, also sometimes referred to as the Z Network. The Z Organisation was an intelligence network intentionally kept apart from SIS, but one that operated in parallel to those networks having been set-up by SIS PCO's in Europe. The Z Organisation was the brainchild of Claude Dansey, who recognized that if the Germans would ever compromise the Passport Control Office, British intelligence would be irreparably damaged, and created the Z Organisation as a backstop.
Cohen was placed in charge of the London headquarters branch of the Z Organisation, based out of a rented office suite at Bush House, Aldwych, and another building on Maple Street, Fitzrovia. Cohen was codenamed Kenneth Crane, acting as an executive officer for the commercial front Menoline Limited. In this capacity, every Z agent in London reported directly to Cohen at this office. "Z agents," as they were called, had been recruited by Dansey – known as Colonel Z – largely from the journalism industry, or were members of the British expat business community abroad, both careers having legitimate reasons for constant travel. They were assigned numbers as their code names for telegraphy purposes. Cohen, while technically an officer and not an agent, was assigned the number Z-3.
In 1937, Cohen was appointed assistant to Thomas Kendrick, head of the Passport Control Office in Paris. However, in 1938, Kendrick was arrested while crossing Austrian border, after being betrayed by a double agent. While he was only held in prison for twenty days, Kendrick's network collapsed. During the Phoney War, in 1939, Cohen continued working with Kendrick and took a new cover identity as Captain Crank, redeveloping clandestine intelligence operations with Kendrick around the continent.
At around the same time that Cohen and Kendrick were operating on the continent in 1938, another officer named Dick Ellis was managing the 22000 Organisation, which was an intelligence network operating as an arm of SIS in Germany.
World War II
Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Claude Dansey was forced to merge the Z Organisation into SIS, against his own wishes. Dansey's fears were realized when, shortly after the merger, the entire SIS network in Europe was compromised by a double agent. Sigismund Best, Cohen's counterpart in Holland, was abducted at Venlo in November 1939. Cohen's duties, with the Z Organisation shut down, were then shifted to the A4 Section of SIS, also known as the French Country Section.In May, 1940, with Cohen's forced evacuation back to England, Stewart Menzies placed Cohen in charge of the SIS Section A5, while placing Wilfred Dunderdale in charge of Section A4. Cohen was still reporting to Dansey, who was now assistant director of SIS, while Dunderdale was reporting directly to Menzies. Cohen was deployed again to France under the re-organized French Section.
Later in 1940, he was made the SIS A4 chief of Vichy France, designated the P1 Production Section. Cohen's task here became to recruit sources from Unoccupied France, and especially to coordinate with French Resistance movements that might be made amenable networks for SIS intelligence.
Under Cohen's command as P1;
- P1a, North Africa
- P1b, Non-Free French
- P1c, Free French
One of those officers that Cohen deployed at this time to France, through Spain, was Gilbert Renault, known as "Colonel Rémy," who began establishing a network of agents along the French Atlantic coast.
Cohen did not care if he had the cooperation of the Free French, and developed networks throughout France no matter their affiliation, as long as they could become allied to SIS. He fostered relationships with and Raymond Triboulet – one of whom developed a smaller network known as the Triboulet Network. He also developed the Sosies with and Dominique Ponchardier. Another smaller group he developed was called the.
ALLIANCE Network
Another important recruit for Cohen was a man named Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, who took the codename "Navarre." Loustaunau-Lacau was a hero of the First World War who had worked directly underneath Philippe Pétain against the Germans at the Marne and the Somme. He was the head of a veterans' association of former French soldiers known as Les Anciens Combattants, but he was also exceptionally right-wing and anti-communist, which complicated Cohen's relationships with the NKVD on the Eastern Front. Loustaunau-Lacau called his own network at the time "Kul."One of Cohen's recruits was Jacques Bridou, who was parachuted into France in March 1941 to take over the management of. However, Lacau was arrested by his former Lieutenant Maxime Weygand in North Africa after attempting to incite an insurrection there, leaving Bridou to coordinate a new apparatus. Bridou then ensured that it was his own sister, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who would take over the management of ALLIANCE.
Fourcade met Cohen for the first time in person in Lisbon, where Cohen then learned that she was a woman, and a mother of two.
Liaison to Washington
In the summer of 1941, Cohen was sent to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a liaison officer to the newly created Office of the Coordinator of Information. He helped here to establish an intelligence network on the Iberian Peninsula.As a result of his experiences in both Washington and France, he became an intermediary between the Office of Strategic Services and the Bureau central de renseignements et d'action.