Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

SECTION D• 477

tection formulas to identify suspect texts and to develop new chemi-

cal agents for use as invisible ink. During World War I MI5

established a laboratory to test correspondence extracting from the

mail through routineImperial Censorship. During World War IISe-

cret Intelligence Servicetrainees were taught that among the more

easily acquired ingredients for secret ink were human urine, bird ex-

creta, and aquae vitae.

SECTION D.A sabotage organization created by MajorLaurence
Grandof the Royal Engineers in March 1938 and based at 2 Caxton
Street and in the neighboring St. Ermin’s Hotel, Victoria, with cover
as the War Office’s nonexistent ‘‘Statistical Research Department.’’
Section D (for ‘‘destruction’’) was intended to eliminate vital strate-
gic assets on the Continent and thereby deny them to the Nazis. Ac-
cording to a minute dated 5 June 1939, Grand’s ‘‘D for Destruction’’
unit was instructed to ‘‘investigate every possibility of attacking po-
tential enemies by means other than the operations of military
forces’’—but he had no staff apart fromMonty Chidsonand a ruth-
less Australian businessman, George Taylor. Funding was supplied
by mining magnate (Sir) Chester Beatty.
Section D’s target area was the Balkans and its key figure in the
region was Julius Hanau, a British businessman with close connec-
tions with Beatty who was the Vickers representative in Belgrade.
Beatty’s company, the Selection Trust Group, owned huge holdings
in southeastern Europe, including the Trepca Mines in Serbia, one of
the richest mineral deposits in Europe, which at that time employed
some 3,000 miners. Two of Beatty’s local management team—
metallurgist S. W. (‘‘Bill’’) Bailey and a South African mining engi-
neer, D. T. (‘‘Bill’’) Hudson—participated in Hanau’s scheme to
sabotage the flow of Romanian oil from Giurgiu to Regensberg in
Germany by blowing up the Danube gorge known as theIron Gates,
using gelignite from the Trepca mine. Among the first targets were
the Ploesti oil fields in Romania and the docks at Oxelo ̈sund, but
none of these operations succeeded.
Section D personnel were deployed abroad underking’s messen-
gercover and established caches of explosives for use in the event of
a Nazi invasion. Among those recruited into Section D wereDavid
Walker,Alexander Rickman, Merlin Minshall,Gerald Glover,
andLouis Franck.