Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

WELSH, ERIC• 571

captured by the Turks. The solution was to make theAenne Rickmers

a Royal Fleet Auxiliary and give Weldon a commission in the Royal

Naval Reserve. He operated in the Eastern Mediterranean, and in Jan-

uary 1917 he joined theManagem, a smaller, less conspicuous steam

yacht that routinely infiltrated agents, and carrier pigeons, into

enemy territory.

Weldon’s memoirs,Hard Lying,were published in 1925, after the

special allowance paid to naval personnel serving on destroyers and

torpedo boats. After the war Weldon became surveyor-general of

Egypt and retired to England, where he relied upon his diaries to re-

call his service with MI1(c).

WELLINGTON, DUKE OF.Throughout thePeninsula War,the
Duke of Wellington benefited from an impressive intelligence organi-
zation headed by Major Colquohoun Grant and later boasted that he
‘‘knew everything the enemy was doing, and planning to do.’’ Grant
had mobilized the Spanish peasantry into a force of irregulars against
the French, and both intercepted and read many of Napoleon’s enci-
phered dispatches. During the Waterloo campaign, Wellington relied
on Colonel Hardinge in Brussels, who had recruited at least two
sources inside the French War Ministry and was able to relay regular
reports on French intentions, morale, and Napoleon’s order of battle,
correctly identifying the relative weakness of the National Guard that
would be exploited to great advantage in what the Duke would later
describe as ‘‘a dam’ close run thing.’’

WELSH, ERIC.Transferred from theNaval Intelligence Divisionto
theNorwegian Sectionof theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) in
1940, as a deputy toFrank Foley, Commander Eric Welsh was the
first SIS officer with a scientific degree. He had strong Norwegian
connections, having managed a paint factory outside Oslo before the
war and married a Norwegian. Later in World War II, Welsh was
attached to theTube Alloysproject to monitor the enemy’s nuclear
development program. He relied on three sources of information: ad-
vice from recently arrived refugee scientists, articles published in ac-
ademic journals, and secret information derived from SIS channels.
With help fromRudolf Peierls, Welsh compiled a list of 16 German
scientists who were either known to be researching the subject or