thanks to everyone for their work on the intercept, it looks really important and i have discussed the contents with harry. our sources in germany have confirmed that the nca magazine carried the instructions issued by ih and nr, and vk wrote to the chief constables of local police forces requesting them to keep an eye out for the touring groups and to report on any matters of interest. special branch are coordinating intelligence activities and forwarded a report from the local constabulary in norfolk detailing activity by one of the touring cycling parties who were seen taking photographs and sketching the landscape at caistor st edmund. the local constable questioned them, but they were not held as there were no grounds for an arrest. they had arrived at harwich and were apparently touring norfolk at the invitation of a local scout group before heading to london.
while there are significant defence installations in that area, caistor st edmund seems an unlikely target for german intelligence so perhaps this is innocent, but the evidence we have so far suggests that that is unlikely. another possibility is that it is a red herring operation disguising the activities of other groups, but just in case i will make enquiries with our sister agencies to see if there is anything we should know about in that area.
i asked our agents in norfolk to report on unusual activity and sent them a list of keywords that should trigger investigation. they forwarded the attached message addressed to tirpitzufer, which was left at the caistor st edmund post office by the local scoutmaster. it was in a bulky packet containing a number of sketches of the area together with an encrypted message which we need you to decipher quickly. analysis of other communication intercepts have suggested that this message may also contain a key to future communications across the spyclist network so you should spend some time thinking about it once you have submitted the decrypt.
while the mission of the spyclists is spelled out in detail in the last decrypt, it is still not clear what the larger aims of the abwehr mission might be, but your research into wilhelm and nikolaus has probably led you to the same conclusion as me: this is a high-level mission and is likely to pose a significant threat to our security. it follows that we should increase our own security to prevent nazi code breakers from reading our messages, so i will lengthen the keyword in my next mission briefing. i will also review our communication protocols for subsequent messages with harry and will update you on the standards to use in mission briefing 4.
the report from norfolk gave me an idea about how we could gather intelligence on the spyclist network. harry and i discussed this with vk since it carries a number of risks, but vk approved the strategy which we have given the codename the akela initiative. more to follow.
pearl