TREVOR ROPER, HUGH• 549Special Branch would take sole responsibility for countering Irish re-
publican terrorism, and that Scotland Yard’s civilian intelligence
staff, among them CaptainGuy Liddell, Millicent Bagot, Bunty
Saunders, and Hugh Miller, would join MI5.TRENCH, BERNARD.In May 1910 Major Bernard Trench of the
Royal Marines, attached to theNaval Intelligence Division, was ar-
rested on the German island of Borkum while studying the coastal
defenses. He was sentenced to four years’ ‘‘fortress detention,’’
which he served at Glatz in Silesia with his companion, Captain Viv-
ian Brandon. There they were joined by a French intelligence officer,
Captain Luz, who had been caught spying on theZeppelinairship
works at Friedrichshafen. The two Britons remained in custody for
22 months before they were released in an amnesty, allowing Trench
to acquire a fluency in German, which he used with skill against Ger-
man PoWs held at Donnington Hall during World War I. Trench re-
tained an interest in airships and in September 1916 recovered an
important enemy codebook from the wreckage of the L-32 in Essex.
He was also responsible for establishing a submarine plotting room
for the Western Approaches at Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland.
TREVOR ROPER, HUGH.Hugh Trevor Roper, Lord Dacre, is one
of those rare individuals who has served in bothMI5and theSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS). His initiation into the secret world took
place when, at the beginning of World War II, he left Oxford and
joined the Radio Security Service (RSS), a little known but vital off-
shoot of the Security Service. As well as monitoring the airwaves for
illicit wireless transmissions, the RSS also fulfilled a vital crypto-
graphic role, intercepting enemy radio signals and decoding mes-
sages exchanged between German agents and their controllers.
Following the RSS’s success in decrypting enemy signals, Trevor
Roper’s section was transferred in 1941 from RSS to SIS’sSection
V, but its task remained the same, the study of the German intelli-
gence service, theAbwehr, from a distance using intercepts.
At the end of hostilities Trevor Roper traveled to Berlin to report
on Hitler’s fate, and his report formed the basis of his subsequent
best-seller,The Last Days of Hitler. He also had hoped to publish a
biography of AdmiralWilhelm Canaris, the Abwehr’s chief, but he