Page 151 - They Also Served

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Frank Foley 1917.
Francis Edward Foley was born in
Somerset on 24th November 1884, the
third son of a Great Western Railway
worker. Winning a scholarship, he was
educated at Stonyhurst College before
attending a Catholic seminary in France
to train as a priest. Deciding on an
academic career however, he studied
classics at the University of Poitiers
and later travelled extensively on the
continent, becoming fluent in French
and German. Foley was studying philosophy in Hamburg when war broke out in 1914, rendering him an enemy alien. However, he stole a uniform and escaped from Germany by train, pretending he was a Prussian officer on his way to the front. Although an obvious candidate for service with military intelligence, such was the demand for infantry manpower that he was commissioned into the Hertfordshire Regiment in January 1917.
Attached to the North Staffordshire Regiment on the Western Front, he was shot through the lung and MiD. No longer fit for front-line service, Foley was finally accepted into the Intelligence Corps and, in July 1918, was part of a small unit recruiting, training and running agents in France and the Low Countries. Immediately after the war, he served with the Inter-Allied Military Commission in Cologne before retiring as a captain in 1921. Serving as the passport control officer in the British Embassy in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, the post was a cover for his work as head of the MI6 detachment in the city. During this time, he recruited numerous agents and acquired vital information on the build-up of the German military following the rise to power of Hitler. Indeed, his work recruiting and handling agents still forms the basis for security service training today.
As Hitler’s persecution of the Jews gathered pace, Foley used his official position at the embassy to issue visas for people to travel to Britain or Palestine. A Palestine visa required a surety of £1,000, a huge sum in the 1930s, but Foley accepted £10 on the never-fulfilled provision that the remainder would be forwarded once the recipient reached Haifa. Those refugees who had no money at all were persuaded to produce
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