A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Denniston looked more like an adventurer of the mind. And in 1938, with little to go upon, he had attempted the Mount Everest of intellectual challenges: the reconstruction of a top-secret Nazi cipher system possibly based on some unknown modifications of an old commercial coding mechanism. After the failure of the Polish engineer’s mock-up, Stephenson, using his knowledge of electronic transmission and cipher machines, provided more specifications and tracked down a German SS unit in the Danzig area where Poland’s Secret Service could hope to recover cipher books. The new Enigmas were being delivered to frontier units, and in early 1939 a military truck containing one was ambushed. Polish agents staged an accident in which fire destroyed the evidence. German investigators assumed that some charred bits of coils, springs, and rotors were the remains of the real Enigma. Ironically, the box that contained the battery model had been deliberately made of wood to facilitate destruction if the operator faced capture. Thus it was made easier for the hijackers to fake loss by fire.

  The real Enigma, taken to Warsaw, was somewhat larger than an old-fashioned portable Underwood typewriter. During Colin Gubbins’s mission to Warsaw early in 1939, it had been placed in one of those large leather bags then in general use among world travelers—a bulky affair with brass locks and reassuring leather straps to hold it together, and plastered with worn hotel and steamship stickers. This impressive bag was left beside the piles of luggage in the foyer of Warsaw’s old Bristol Hotel, a watering hole favored by crusty colonels and their ladies. Among the Bristol’s patrons was Alastair Denniston, who was then in his fifties. He had flown there with a steamship bag identical to the one now holding the stolen Enigma. The bags were casually shuffled, and Denniston left at once with his prize, exchanged for some dirty shirts and some weighty but otherwise dispensable books.

  It was a week before Germany attacked Poland, and Denniston’s prize was the greatest gift any nation could give another. The Polish Secret Service had helped capture it and work out some of the Nazi methods of using it. The gesture of passing this knowledge and the machine to the British was that of a warrior flinging his sword to an ally before he fell. It more than compensated Britain for signing the Anglo-Polish Treaty three days later, on August 25, committing Britain to make war on Germany if she invaded Poland: a promise regarded as foolish, ill-timed, and impractical by postwar historians.

  The bag with its enigmatic cargo was flown to London and from there to the privacy of the Duke of Bedford’s estate, some sixty miles away. It was Gubbins’s close ties with the Polish Secret Service that had made possible this extraordinary moment.

  So strong was Gubbins’s sense of obligation and comradeship that he was already leading a thirty-man team straight back into Poland—“a journey carried out in the face of considerable diplomatic difficulties,” a fellow intelligence officer, Carton de Wiart, wrote later. In fact, the British Foreign Office, in its self-righteous disapproval of espionage, refused to help. Gubbins and the team were trapped inside Poland after the invasion. The incident was one indication of British official attitudes. To avoid any more bureaucratic lunacies, the Heydrich-Enigma was smuggled up to the Duke’s estate. Close by was Bletchley Park, once a Roman encampment, later granted to Bishop Geoffrey by William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings. The mansion on this historic piece of land dated back a mere sixty years. It was a red-brick Victorian monstrosity, but it was also just about the last place anyone would expect to find the keys to Hitler’s day-by-day decisions and the enemy’s inner secrets.

  Hidden in the rolling farmland all about were webs of radio aerials, already spread to net the faint murmurings of distant transmitters. At the center of each web were groups of experienced ships’ radio operators to supplement the few C. employed. Stephenson, who had never forgotten his schoolboy exchanges with the Morse operators on Great Lakes freighters, regarded seagoing radiomen as among the world’s best. They were accustomed to discomfort and to working in close quarters alone. They could hang onto the faint signals of a moving station surrounded by the clutter of other transmissions drifting across the wave bands. At sea, they had to recognize quickly the “fist” of the particular operator they might seek, detecting subtle characteristics in the way he worked his key that amounted to an individual signature. They had a sense for danger, important when later their transmissions guided the secret armies in Nazi Europe. Between the wars, thousands of such ships’ operators were kept on a special reserve list in anticipation of a conflict fought in darkness. Admiral Hall had long ago worked out his plans to mobilize these men without alarming the enemy.

  The stolen Heydrich-Enigma was probably the most guarded mystery in Britain. The growing band of eavesdroppers proposed to behave in a manner shocking to those in power who shared Henry L. Stimson’s view that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” The task facing Bletchley was formidable enough without harassment from London. Teams would pluck out of the ether the faintest of enemy murmurings. Others would puzzle over the groups of meaningless figures and letters. Still others would attempt to test all the possible settings on the captured Heydrich-Enigma until the flow of messages for any particular day made sense—knowing the Germans altered the settings at the originating station as frequently as every eight hours.

  There was a brief panic when the Nazis betrayed knowledge that something unusual might be happening. In a propaganda broadcast, the British traitor known as Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, followed his familiar opening—“Germany calling”—with a description of the small town. The British responded by spreading stories that the BBC was erecting some local broadcasting aerials. More to be feared than Nazi detection was the mentality of government leaders in London who stoutly refused to bomb Germany while the Nazi Air Force was engaged in Poland. In vain, Gubbins and his “agricultural mission” tried to convince London from their position inside the shattered country that Poles were being deliberately terrorized, their children and churches singled out for attack. Chamberlain’s men were hypnotized by vague hints of peace and compromises from Berlin. Then silence fell over Poland. Gubbins’s team and the Polish Secret Service were out of touch, lost in conquered Nazi territory, bringing home to Bletchley the urgent need to build an underground network of communications in Europe as well as to intercept the enemy’s signals.

  In the mansion at Bletchley Park, a priesthood of dons waited on the Heydrich-Enigma. Within their reach might be a coup greater by far than the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram. With perseverance and luck, they hoped to read Hitler’s orders to his generals, their replies, their orders to subordinates, the field commanders’ reports on each fighting unit’s capacity in the immediate future, the positions of enemy warships, names of personnel and postings, requests for men and material—an almost hourly picture of the enemy’s ability to strike, where and how and when. The Golf, Cheese and Chess Society could not know that it had only 150 days to solve the riddle before Hitler smashed his way to the English Channel.

  8

  “In some mysterious way, Hitler was expected by French and British leaders to wear himself out on the plains of Poland. Neville Chamberlain did everything not to antagonize the enemy,” remembered Stephenson. “President Roosevelt was afraid Chamberlain might negotiate peace. There was not much the President could do to support those resisting both Chamberlain and Hitler. American public opinion was the target of Nazi propaganda guns, no less than Warsaw had been the target of Nazi bombs. And American opinion was against us.”

  So Roosevelt wrote an astonishing invitation to Churchill to bare his breast in private and confidential communications. A correspondence began on September 11, 1939, unique between the chief of state of a neutral power and an unrecognized foreign leader. The President acknowledged that although Churchill might be without power in Parliament, as First Lord of the Admiralty he was directing the secret warriors. The replies, during the next 150 days, called “the Phony War,” were signed “Naval Person” and went to POTUS, the President of the U
nited States.

  The period was known as the Phony War because the Anglo-French alliance seemed to dodge any real engagement with the enemy, while behind the scenes there were disturbing signs of peace negotiations with Hitler. Those who believed that the enemy used these peace overtures to gain time were forced to behave like conspirators in preparing for the inevitable German onslaught. If the President wanted to join these secret warriors, it would help if they gave him ammunition to fight Nazi and isolationist influences in the U.S. Here was another reason for Bletchley to get results. If the British needed advance notice of Hitler’s military moves, Roosevelt also needed inside information to convince his doubting service chiefs of Germany’s ambitions and Britain’s worthiness as an ally.

  Churchill therefore wanted to put Stephenson at the President’s side right away as director of British secret intelligence and as a practitioner of covert diplomacy. Stephenson could then prepare a base in the United States for over-all direction of secret warfare if Britain fell, as seemed likely if the appeasers stayed in control. But Stephenson had his own order of priorities. Solving the Enigma riddle came first. If that were done in time, guerrilla warfare inside Britain might be unnecessary.

  A beautiful and secretive woman who prized her privacy gave him a clue. Greta Garbo was one of the many actors and actresses who, working in his studios, became his close friends. The Swedish actress had reported high-level Nazi sympathizers in Stockholm. The neutral port was ideal for German intelligence operations. Were the Germans using Heydrich-Enigmas in foreign stations?

  His commercial operations were now interwoven with intelligence. The top-secret Economic Pressure on Germany Committee had always known that Stephenson’s business interests would be at the disposal of British warmakers. In addition, all profits were to help defense. Commercial representatives abroad could be used as sources of intelligence. Industrial secrets would be shared ungrudgingly. This gave Stephenson more strength behind the scenes. He used it to mount the first intelligence operation in the new style. The Committee was the forerunner of the British wartime ministry devoted to blowing up, flooding, disrupting, wrecking, and in other ways neutralizing or stealing enemy resources. Churchill called it “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” It was hidden in Desmond Morton’s shadow Ministry of Economic Warfare, which had been organizing during the previous four years, when Churchill seemed beaten.

  “There was more to Stephenson’s mission for the Committee than met the eye,” said Ian Fleming, who had been plucked out of newspaper work and the business world to join the Director of Naval Intelligence. The future creator of James Bond was known then only as “17F,” a designation picked at random to conceal his real duties. Fleming said later: “Stephenson’s cover story was that he had to go to Sweden on business. He had commercial interests there. The secondary cover, for intelligence types who needed to know his movements, was that he would destroy the source and the supply lines of iron ore which Germany’s steel industries depended upon.”

  Arguments about the wisdom of risking Stephenson shuttled back and forth between Churchill and other secret-warfare chiefs. Then, in October 1939, Colin Gubbins made good his escape from conquered Poland. He had slipped into Rumania and from there traveled through the Balkans to the Mideast. He brought with him the nucleus of a Polish secret army. Otherwise, he had nothing but bad news.

  Commander Fleming reported: “The rape of Poland by both Hitler and Stalin meant that the two greatest totalitarian states in the world were in partnership against us. And what were we? A group of small islands led by Chamberlain nervously biting his thumb. The news from Poland was that a secret additional protocol to the Stalin-Hitler pact had assigned spheres of influence splitting the world between them.

  “Now we learned there was a distinct possibility of the physicists joining forces under the swastika and the hammer-and-sickle to split the atom too.

  “This was not a wild nightmare. Until Stalin’s purge of the Red Army, Russia and Germany worked closely on new weapons. A few months before Germany and Russia carved Poland between them, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin bombarded the uranium atom and split it—nuclear fission! The Russians were concentrating their energies on the same task. If they could make a pact with the Nazis and then denounce us in Britain as warmongers, we had to face the danger that they could complete the turnaround in science too.”

  Stephenson pointed out that atomic research required heavy water, a sinister and eerie term for that peculiar substance with the doubled hydrogen nucleus that was a neutron slower in uranium fission. The source of heavy water for German experiments was Norway.

  “Deny it to the Germans and we stop that line of progress,” he told Churchill.

  “And then—?”

  “One of the greatest atomic scientists is within Hitler’s grasp. Niels Bohr has split the uranium atom with a release of energy a million times more powerful than the same quantity of high explosive. He did it in his Copenhagen laboratory.”

  Churchill nodded. “If we know this, so do the Russians.”

  “Exactly. It’s a tossup if Hitler or Stalin takes over Scandinavia.”

  The northern regions were a powerful magnet by the winter of 1939 as Stephenson prepared to conduct his own intelligence operations there.

  “He managed it very skilfully,” Ian Fleming recalled. “He knew Churchill had already questioned the Secretary for Air . . . ‘What danger is there, pray, that atomic bombs might fall on London?’ These demands from the First Lord were always brash and brief. They had to be answered at once. They were known as Churchill’s ‘prayers’ and they put lesser men on the defensive. Bill Stephenson simply used them so he could go on the offensive.

  “Bill knew, too, that in this same month—October 1939—his colleague Alexander Sachs, the New York financier and mathematician, had got to President Roosevelt with a letter from Albert Einstein and other atomic scientists warning that the dictators could build the new bombs. Roosevelt had taken action and informed Churchill.

  “So Bill held some winning cards. He thought the Norwegian heavy-water plant would have to be destroyed by ‘schoolboy adventurers’ raised by Churchill. . . . The Striking Companies. He could undertake an offensive-intelligence operation to demonstrate British resolve to fight the war, despite Chamberlain. He badly wanted to prevent the Germans getting the atom scientist, Professor Bohr. And he had a pretty good idea where to get code books that would help the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society solve Enigma. His target was Stockholm in neutral Sweden. From there, he could move in any direction and set up a network free from bureaucratic control here in London.”

  At the end of November, Russia invaded Finland. This put the adjoining territories of Norway and Sweden in double jeopardy. Hitler might have another secret protocol with Stalin. Or he might move first in anticipation of the Soviet Red Armies. Either way, Scandinavia was in grave danger.

  On December 16, 1939, Churchill issued another “prayer,” requiring Naval Intelligence support for STRIKE OX. Vital supplies for Nazi Germany “must be prevented from leaving by methods which will be neither diplomatic nor military.”

  STRIKE OX was named after Oxeloesund, an ice-free port about sixty miles southwest of Stockholm. The supplies for Nazi Germany were tons of Swedish iron ore, which, if interrupted, would leave Hitler with only enough stockpiled to keep the Ruhr steel industry going for another nine months. This was a seemingly valid argument for sabotaging the port’s loading ramps and cranes; Nazi intelligence, if this idea was let slip, would believe it. But when Churchill spoke of stopping certain vital supplies, he and a very small circle of scientists knew that heavy water also traveled this route from Norway to Germany and might reach Russia, too. Only 150 miles across the Baltic Sea from Oxeloesund were the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, recently absorbed by the Soviet Union. To the northeast, Red Armies battled the Finns.

  A sense of impending doom invaded England that Christmas of 1939, despite some jeers and cri
ticism from the United States that the Chamberlain government was merely playing at war. King George VI broadcast a strangely haunting message, ending: “I said to the man at the gate of the Year—‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.’ . . . May that Almighty Hand guide and uphold us all.”

  Stephenson spent the first Christmas of the war awaiting delivery in Stockholm of packages of plastic explosive wrapped in forty-pound bundles. The new explosive material resembled modeling clay, to be delivered to the studio of a Swedish sculptor. Then Swedish counter-espionage picked up reports that Stephenson was on a sabotage mission. Walter Lindquist, its chief, filed a report that duly reached German agents: this forty-three-year-old Canadian industrialist had plans to destroy the port installations owned by his old friend Axel Axelson Johnson, a major stockholder in iron-ore mines and owner of the railroad from the mines to the port of Oxeloesund, whose docks and loading equipment also belonged to him. It seemed hardly likely to them that Johnson, however sympathetic to Britain, would help blow up his own properties.

  The truth was that Johnson, as he told Stephenson, “felt he had the right to liquidate his own holdings in his own way.” His mines produced an iron ore high in phosphorus and therefore essential to the German Bessemer process of making high-grade steel. Stephenson had studied the German process in visiting the United Steel Works, whose president was Hitler’s former financial backer, the disenchanted Fritz Thyssen.