Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed . . .
Turns his necessity to glorious gain. . . .
And in himself possess his own desire . . .
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth, or honors, or for worldly state . . .
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.
Stephenson never in his life publicly displayed his romanticism. It was, however, typical of the mood of those who survived a certain kind of individual combat. A few oldsters understood this sentiment and were willing to tap the energies it released.
Admiral Hall sent word that Stephenson should return to London in the early 1920s. Hall had retired into the shadows. The British intelligence community had been drastically reduced, and Hall tried to keep it alive through groups of civilians in politics, international affairs, and scientific development. He regarded Stephenson as “a brilliant mathematician who, like the American pioneers, can see no limit to his horizons . . . a most rare combination of the man of action and of imagination.” Believing that the interception of enemy communications and cryptanalysis were the foundation of good modern intelligence, Hall built up contacts in industry, commerce, and the universities, where he could tap resources of intellect. The modern science of cryptology had grown from humble beginnings: the invention of telegraphy. Stephenson had demonstrated an inventive genius of his own in the field. Now he learned that while he had been fighting in France, other battles had been conducted by scholars who had applied academic discipline and logic to break down German codes and who could pinpoint the exact disposition of U-boats and Zeppelins by snatching orders out of the ether. Others analyzed general radio traffic to gain an insight into enemy thinking: a craft in itself, so that those who became skilled in “traffic analysis” were regarded by Hall as far too valuable to be lost in the postwar defense cuts. There was not yet a profession called “cryptanalysis,” and those who were good at solving coded mysteries were found in departments of classical history, mathematics, and even dead languages. These formed a tiny unpaid nucleus. Around them, Hall gathered likely young fellows who could make it in the commercial world.
Stephenson found himself talking to British radio manufacturers about the Canadian pioneer venture in government-run broadcasting. He was convinced that public broadcasting services could be a powerful instrument for good or evil, and his views were shared by a former fellow pilot, Gladstone Murray, an air ace who became aviation correspondent for the London Daily Express, owned by another Canadian, Lord Beaverbrook. The three of them produced a case for the formation of a British Broadcasting Company. It was financed, like the Winnipeg station, by government license. The BBC was later incorporated to function without interference by the ruling political party. It created a national audience of millions and a market for builders of radio equipment. Thus it ensured research and development in Admiral Hall’s field. It also gave work to talented individuals like Murray, who became BBC publicity director—an appointment that would prove useful in the next war.
“There wasn’t a lot of money available in those days,” Stephenson said later. “What counted was encouragement and being able to find enthusiastic co-workers. Whatever lesson the war taught me about personal survival were overshadowed by a conviction that our society had to defend itself against sudden attack or we’d have another world war. H. G. Wells became a good friend and adviser. The public knew him as a historian and prophet in fiction. Few knew about his passionate belief that in the science-fiction wars to come, our first line of defense would be information, rapidly conveyed. We’d both learned to distrust an elite class that claimed the privilege of leadership in good times and then, having led the people into calamity, let them fight their own way out.”
Stephenson wrote papers on what he called “Tele-vision,” the method of transmitting moving pictures by radio waves. Why not make it a practical reality? He worked on mathematical equations to prove pictures could be transmitted as easily as sound. He bought an interest in two electronics firms in England, contributing ideas and labor to make up for what he lacked in ready cash. General Radio and Cox-Cavendish were in the forefront of new developments in radio and electrical equipment. At the age of twenty-six he was marketing thousands of small home receiving sets for BBC listeners in the British Isles. His life was one of fiendish activity in spartan quarters. Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, backed his experiments in the conversion of light into electric current. In December 1922 that newspaper published the first photograph transmitted by radio. It hailed the event as “a revolution in communications” and the inventor as “a brilliant young scientist.”
He was now drawn into a circle of scientists gathered by Winston Churchill, through his personal force of character, around the person of Professor Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, but always “the Prof” to Churchill and Stephenson. It was the Prof who began sounding the alarm about German militarism and its revival in an atmosphere of pseudo-scientific racism. Germany was also leaping forward in science and military technology. Stephenson’s own ideas were stimulated by the revolutionary theory that gravitation bends light, propounded by Albert Einstein, who had been part of resurgent Germany’s intellectual establishment. The Prof and a secret British defense committee kept in touch with the physicist, and also encouraged research in Britain on splitting the atom. The problem was always one of funds. There was popular hostility to government-financed research and development of arms. Men like Churchill were political outcasts for warning that preparation was the only guarantee against another “unnecessary war.”
His secret defense committee was held together by little else than a common sense of purpose, to discourage tyrants by a display of armed readiness. One of its concealed accomplishments in the 1920s was the development of Larynx, a “catapult-bomb”—in effect, a guided missile that foreshadowed the rockets Hitler aimed later at London. Whatever was done, however, depended upon the interplay of industrial scientists. They attracted refugee scientists from Germany; and the best were given moral support by Churchill’s followers.
Stephenson brought into his business such a man, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a Jewish scientist whose socialist views were so strong that he had been forced to leave Germany years earlier. “Steiny was a mathematical genius. He calculated laws to prove the feasibility of inventions that even today seem pretty advanced,” said Stephenson fifty years later. “He had already covered a wide range of electronics before the end of the nineteenth century. At the age of fifty-seven he found himself working in the United States for a large corporation whose policies stifled his creative powers. I knew his work, heard of his discontent, and offered him freedom in my own labs.”
Their first encounter was described by writer Roald Dahl: “The first impression of Stephenson was a small man of immense power. Nothing indecisive about him at all. There was bound to be trepidation and fear because you were right in the lion’s den. But when you got to know him better, you understood his immense capabilities. He worked hard, he played around with his businesses and his scientific things, he coupled them up and made fortunes with apparently no trouble at all. Even Steiny could never stretch this man to his full mental capacity. He just accommodated every new idea, digested everything, and created out of what he absorbed.”
Stephenson was still a man of action. He continued to hold his title of amateur lightweight boxing champion until he retired in 1928, still undefeated, when he became owner of Britain’s National Sporting Club. Steinmetz confronted him with a different kind of challenge, demanding days and nights of concentrated mental labor. Once, in pursuit of the laser beam, half a century before its practical application, Stephenson was still at work as dawn broke. “Steiny peered at my sheets of figures and said, ‘Beeell, you are slowing down!’ Then he studied my calculus and blamed the sloppy work on my heavy smoking. Not lack of sleep.
Too many cigarettes! So I threw down my last cigarette and never smoked again.”
Another refugee scientist, Chaim Weizmann, entered Stephenson’s circle. This tall, princely figure first appeared on the English scene in 1903. He had left his home in the Jewish Pale near Pinsk to study chemistry in Europe. He was drawn to London for reasons shared with many Jewish scientists, which he summarized in a letter to his fiancée: “If we are to get help from any quarter, it will be England which, I don’t doubt, will help us in Palestine. . . . This [London] is the hub of the world and really, you sense the breathing of a giant.” In 1916, Weizmann had perfected a new process for making acetone, which eased a critical explosives shortage. This brought him in touch with Churchill and other English statesmen. They encouraged his dreams of a Jewish dominion in which Jewish creative energies would combine with British improvisation. By the 1920s he had become president of the Zionist Organization and was known as “the uncrowned king of the Jews.”
From Steinmetz and Weizmann, Stephenson learned more than scientific innovation. “They opened my mind to new concepts,” he said later. “Steiny taught me German with a guttural Hebrew accent. Weizmann foresaw an age of small and independent nations whose first line of defense would be knowledge. They both believed science would produce weapons to enable small communities to put up impregnable defenses when danger threatened—like the porcupine raising its quills. And all would depend on early warning.”
Stephenson saw such an early-warning system as a co-ordinated intelligence service. Admiral Blinker Hall was the man who might accomplish it. Hall was now Churchill’s personal intelligence chief. But Churchill’s political fortunes were in decline. There was no British intelligence service faintly resembling those intriguing versions of popular fiction. Instead, there were a few undervalued professionals and some amateurs who began to arrange themselves around Stephenson. And there was the small underpaid, overworked, and ill-appreciated British Secret Intelligence Service, which commanded official recognition and little else.
3
An American equivalent to the British Secret Intelligence Service did not exist at all. There was the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, charged with the interception and solving of enemy communications in wartime; and there was that relic of the war, an organization for intercepting foreign communications, known as the Black Chamber. It was supposed to be “a permanent organization for code and cipher investigation and attack.” But the times were peculiar. Those who warned against the threat of war were warmongers. Those who sensed the menace in and tried to penetrate the secrets of the new totalitarians were sneaks. Those who peered too closely into closed societies were Peeping Toms. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” pontificated Henry L. Stimson after he became Secretary of State in 1929. The Black Chamber shifted its quarters from a fashionable town house at 3 East 38th Street in New York City to an old brownstone at 141 East 37th, like a genteel family going down in the world.
Bill Donovan, who, like Admiral Hall, believed that a free society could survive only with efficient intelligence services, had been sent to Siberia in 1919 to assess the beleaguered White Russians. He applied a rule of good intelligence: his report must be free from personal prejudice. He reported from revolution-torn Russia to the State Department that anti-Communist forces were corrupt and divided. “We can prevent a shooting war,” he wrote, “only if we take the initiative to win the subversive war.”
He went back to Europe in 1920 on a private fact-finding mission financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and again he returned with reports that did not support wishful thinkers. His carefully documented notes on Germany dwelt upon the dangerous mood of self-pity induced by the notion that German leaders had never actually surrendered and were therefore still unbeaten. This conflicted with American public opinion, summarized by William Wiseman, nearing the end of his appointment in Washington as British intelligence chief. “We should be wary,” Wiseman had written to London, “of the American inclination to thrust responsibility for the war upon the Kaiser and what is termed the Military Party. Americans believe the rest of Germany has been an unwilling tool in the hands of military masters. If Germany was to repudiate the Kaiser and become a Republic, there would be an enormous reaction in America in her favour and she might be received again very much like the Prodigal Son.”
Donovan noted the popularity of the German military caste, its determination to rearm, and the opportunities offered to fanatics promising to lead the people out of the economic chaos they were suffering. His reporting methods were described as “anticipating in an uncanny way the functions of a future American intelligence agency” by his biographer, Corey Ford. Donovan had also anticipated Churchill, who was soon saying publicly what Donovan reported privately to a few concerned Americans. “My mind is obsessed with the terrible Germany we saw and felt in action during the years 1914 to 1918,” said Churchill. “I see Germany again possessed of all her martial power while we, the Allies, who so narrowly survived, gape in idleness and bewilderment.”
In the fortress prison of Landsberg, a new German hero conducted meetings of the National Socialist movement and dictated a book that cast a shadow across the years ahead. Adolf Hitler’s autobiography expressed hatred for the Jews, denounced the Bolsheviks, and offered a disturbingly perceptive study of mass propaganda. It was called Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Hitler began it in 1922. Two years later, having failed to seize power in a Putsch, he served a jail sentence for high treason and finished his political testament. It summoned into existence a new kind of man: der Führer, who would command a new barbaric civilization.
Even in prison, Hitler commanded obedience. The warders cried “Heil Hitler!” on entering his cell. When he met a new jailer, he fixed the unfortunate man with blazing eyes. Those subjected to his manic stare agreed that it pierced them to the soul. The prison mailmen staggered to his cell with gifts from all over Germany: wine, fruit, flowers, chocolates, rich cakes, expensive meats, an abundance of luxuries while hardship stalked the streets. Hitler’s chosen henchmen occupied other cells. He had secretaries and a valet. He lunched in a communal hall with fellow Nazis. And thus he finished Mein Kampf, a blueprint for total destruction of existing society and conquest of the world.
Meanwhile, Stephenson crossed the Atlantic again in search of business partners, scientific brains, and opportunities to expand his interests. Radio led him into recorded sound and movies, where he was experimenting, like many others, with the marvels of sound-on-film and “talking pictures.” He was ready to move into the automobile industry. Henry Ford’s assumed monopoly of it had been badly shaken by news that a rival, Chevrolet, had surpassed the Model T in sales. There was a stampede for radio sets and the first products of the embryo electronics industry. Those who were smitten by jazz were pouring money into records by George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman. Stephenson saw opportunity in all these fields. He went to New York seeking business partners in 1924, the year that John D. Rockefeller, Sr., was found to have paid only $124,266 in taxes, whereas his son paid $7,435,169, and the year Charles Dawes presented Germany with a reparations bill that would bankrupt the new republic and smooth Hitler’s rise to power.
Stephenson saw magnificent opportunities for applying American technology to comparatively backward Europe, and ways to develop mass markets in the United States for the products of British inventiveness. United Europe, too, could provide the kind of market that produced large sales and money to finance new ideas.
On the voyage back to England, he met a pretty young girl from Tennessee: Mary French Simmons. She had never traveled so far from home before, but she knew a great deal about the world. She noticed that the small, restless Canadian kept aloof from their fellow passengers and she concluded that he was shy. He seemed interested in reading dull-looking textbooks, although he answered politely when she questioned him about Europe.
“This Mr. Churchill speaks of a United Europe which could accomplish what the Unit
ed States has done in wealth and industry,” she said. “Is it possible?”
Stephenson smiled, and she noticed how it transformed his whole appearance. “There was a chance of that,” he said, “two or three years ago. Now—I’m not so sure.”
“Why is that?”
“For one thing, Mr. Churchill lives quietly in the country, painting visions on canvas. The men who could lead the United States and a United Europe together don’t seem to have much of a following. . . .”
“Who is this man Mussolini?”
Stephenson surrendered to her polite interrogation. By the end of the voyage, he had only one question to ask in return: would Mary marry him. On Sunday, August 31, 1924, the New York Times carried the photograph of an uncommonly handsome girl under the headline AMERICAN GIRL WEDS CANADIAN SCIENTIST.
In Germany, the first chapters of Mein Kampf were being smuggled out of Hitler’s well-furnished cell. By the end of the year, the future Nazi dictator had been released “for good behavior.” The Berliner Tageblatt wrote: “Never before has a court more openly denied the foundation upon which it rests and upon which every modern state is built.” The thugs had bludgeoned justice. Europe united was a dream that would become a nightmare.
4
In that same year of 1924, Stephenson received from Cipher Machines, at 2 Steglitserstrasse, Berlin, the offer of a “secret writing mechanism to frustrate inquisitive competitors.” This was Enigma, harmless enough in its commercial form. It resembled a clumsy great typewriter. Anything typed on its large keyboard passed through a ciphering system and emerged in a scrambled form that would mystify an unauthorized observer.
It seemed to Stephenson that Enigma could be electrified and remodeled into a compact machine. Unknown to him, this is what German intelligence thought, too. By the time Hitler had strong-armed his way to power, a different, and highly secret, Enigma would lie at the heart of Nazi cipher systems.
A Man Called Intrepid Page 4
