The contents of the crate
After three weeks, a Freedom of Information application, a parliamentary question from an MP who had read the newspaper piece, and the threatened publication of a second story, the Ministry of Defence gave a statement. The statement was barely three sentences, in a press release issued on a Friday afternoon. They said that the crate recovered from the submarine had contained technical documentation and prototype components related to a classified wartime acoustic science research.
What the press release did not say—what nobody official would say on record—was that the technology had been developed jointly by a British officer and two German scientists operating under conditions that no wartime protocol could easily explain. It was a quiet agreement between individuals on opposite sides of a catastrophic war, sheltering a piece of technology.
The journalist published a long piece reconstructing Commander Voss’s probable movements between 1942 and the end of the war. He had not defected. He had not been a prisoner. He had, as far as she could determine, simply walked out of official history with the consent of people senior enough to make that possible because what he was building was considered too important to risk losing.
