A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  King George then described FDR’s “ideas in case of War.” The President would lead U.S. public opinion by defining the economic price Americans would have to pay if Hitler conquered Europe. FDR then gave the King precise details on U.S. plans to defend its coasts. “He showed me his naval patrols in greater detail about which he is terribly keen,” the King noted. “If he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences.

  “If London was bombed U.S. would come in.”

  The King set such store by these statements from the President that British intelligence chiefs were advised to go on the assumption that Roosevelt was “part of the family.” Would the President have behaved differently if George VI had not made that brief visit to the White House? George was an exceedingly mild and self-effacing individual, but Roosevelt glimpsed a quality of pride and obstinacy that expressed the character of the islanders. It had surfaced briefly in the simple presentation of the British case that the King made to the U.S. Ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy, a few days after Britain declared war on Germany. Kennedy, on September 9, 1939, had warned the King that England would bankrupt herself in this new war, and should get out while she still could. Three days later, George penned a letter to Kennedy that was remarkably frank. In it, the King wrote: “England, my country . . . is part of Europe. . . . We stand on the threshold of we know not what. Misery & suffering of War we know. But what of the future? The British mind is made up. I leave it at that.”

  11

  If the first Bletchley recoveries were garbled, their import was becoming clearer by the day. The summer would be bright with blood. Stephenson must convey, verbally, to President Roosevelt the sources of alarm and the need for American co-operation in perfecting the Bletchley duplication and understanding of the German Enigma system.

  To get authority in the sullen spring of 1940, he went over Prime Minister Chamberlain’s head to King George VI, with Churchill as intermediary. The King was the ultimate authority in secret-intelligence matters. He made the top intelligence appointments. The British had worked out their own system of checks and balances to prevent the monarch abusing such power—and to prevent a governing party exploiting secret agencies to serve its own ends.

  “If the Nazis set up a puppet government in Britain,” Churchill said in explaining his seeking royal authority, “I could be accused of disclosing confidential material to a foreign state for having confided in Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “Then I lose my head at Traitor’s Gate, too,” replied the King.

  George VI also wanted it made clear that no question would arise of a royal exodus to the United States if the Germans invaded. He would neither run away nor collaborate. His was an important decision. Those Britons who might resort to guerrilla warfare—and they were already being organized under the cover of “Auxiliary Units”—might be condemned by a Nazi government in London as traitors liable to execution. By declaring themselves loyal to a noncollaborating King, and not bound to obey a collaborationist government, they could appeal to the general population for support in resisting the Germans and the puppet authorities.

  “If this question of loyalty had been clarified in occupied countries,” Stephenson said later, “there would have been fewer collaborators. The local bureaucracy, the civil servants of an occupied country, were needed by the Nazis to run routine daily affairs. Wherever Germany conquered, Hitler insisted that the petty bureaucrat’s allegiance automatically passed to whatever puppet held the rubber stamp. This King, commanding the higher loyalty of each citizen, could make it possible for his subjects to resist the enemy and work with ‘a foreign state’—that is, the Americans—without being called traitors. The Nazis would shoot them as traitors anyway. But what counted was that they should not feel like traitors.”

  Churchill, still disliked by many members of a so-called ruling class, needed and got the King’s approval. He could reassure the contingency planners of secret warfare that the lines of authority flowed up to the Palace, a precaution against betrayal by any government in power.

  There were now many names for the groups clustered together to wage secret warfare. The general term “Baker Street Irregulars” was to become used by those in the know. Code names and slang disguised the truth from enemies abroad and at home. One Baker Street leader was that veteran of guerrilla operations Colin Gubbins. After his escape from Poland, he had made a desperate attempt in Norway to organize an armed resistance to German invaders there. By April 1940, he was back in London, determined at least to prevent Britain’s betrayal.

  Gubbins had been raised in the tradition of noblesse oblige. To him, Britain had an obligation to keep her word, to make sacrifices, to suffer pain, or to die to save the less fortunate. Britain should bankrupt herself before letting down others. He was appalled by any prospect of seeing these ideals abandoned.

  Gubbins saw the spirit of resistance as the most powerful force in Europe, if properly inspired and directed. In London, that April, he detected the scent of fear that spread like a fog across the English Channel, the fear already instilled in weak and even treacherous politicians ready to collaborate with barbaric conquerors. He knew what it was like to stand helpless before bullies, to see hostages tortured and shot as a means of keeping control through terror. More important than guns and dynamite was helping the victims to straighten their backs, and Gubbins was determined to build a force of resistance fighters throughout the occupied countries. He had left behind, in Poland and Norway, the nucleus of secret armies based upon the stubborn courage of ordinary men and women. What he needed was the means to co-ordinate their operations and give them moral and physical support.

  In the little time left between the Nazi conquest of Norway and Hitler’s impending offensives across Western Europe, Gubbins’s tailored figure was to be seen marching briskly between sandbagged buildings in the elegant backwaters of Mayfair and Piccadilly, up rickety stairs to dingy offices, or vanishing through the porticos of London’s clubland near St. James’s Palace, where sentry boxes traditionally contained toy-like Guardsmen in scarlet tunics and top-heavy black bearskin busbies.

  Now, in place of the royal paraphernalia, there were optimistic old men with armbands announcing AIR RAID WARDEN and with little buckets of sand and shovels to smother fire bombs. Elderly ladies brewed tea at Hyde Park Gate for the creaking ancients who drilled with broomsticks on Rotten Row. Along the banks of the River Thames, bare-kneed Boy Scouts with fish nets watched and waited for drifting experimental mines, in a guerrilla-warfare exercise about which they were sworn to secrecy.

  For some, secrecy was the watchword of the hour. Chamberlain lingered in Parliament, a stone’s throw from Gubbins’s temporary quarters in St. Ermin’s Hotel, on Caxton Street. “That particular prime minister should have resigned months earlier,” wrote Iain Macleod, a courageous political leader and sometime editor of the Spectator. “Neville Chamberlain forced farsighted patriots to hide their preparations to defend their homes and carry the war back into Nazidom.”

  Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, destined for parachuting on special-intelligence operations, wrote later: “We had reached the point of bugging potential traitors and enemies. Joe Kennedy, the American ambassador, came under electronic surveillance.”

  At Scotland Yard there were ugly reports that confidential material was leaking from the U.S. Embassy. Yet Kennedy was popular among the Prime Minister’s cronies. The evidence of something wrong came from intercepted diplomatic messages, and it was too early to take action.

  In this atmosphere of muddle and suspicion, Stephenson moved carefully. “I couldn’t have blamed Roosevelt for wondering if Britain could be saved from herself, let alone from the enemy.”

  It was this shared outrage and apprehension that put Colin Gubbins in line to run the Baker Street Irregulars. He was with Stephenson at a dinner given by exiled Polish statesmen in London. Also present was the man who would answer in Parliament for the actions of the still unofficial Ministry of Eco
nomic Warfare, Hugh Dalton. He represented a left-wing Labour party faction that rebelled against appeasement. “I suddenly realized that here were the men to lead the Irregulars,” Dalton recalled later. “Gubbins, at that dinner, described his chagrin in Poland where the people seeing him said Thank God for the British!’ when they should have been damning us. He told how the British Treasury squabbled about who would pay for transport to get 120 Hawker Hurricane fighters to the Polish Air Force. . . . Then Stephenson said it was time we learned to fight with the gloves off, the knee in the groin, the stab in the dark. Well, I knew him as a great amateur sportsman. Not an unkind bone in his body. And I thought: If these chaps want dirty tricks, things are in a bad way.”

  The training of Irregulars and future officers of secret armies was removed from direct War Office control.

  “You’ll be training gangsters,” Gubbins was told by those of his colleagues who knew about the plan. “How can a professional soldier like yourself do it?”

  Gubbins could do it because he had seen in Poland the consequences of halfhearted measures. Despite all his efforts to provide eyewitness proof of Nazi terrorism in Poland, the hope had lingered in some circles that a deal could be made with Hitler’s powerful henchman Hermann Göring, whose Air Force had carried out the systematic terror raids against Poland’s helpless civilians. Gubbins had watched those raids. While still trapped in Poland, he had dispatched one of his men through the lines with evidence of German atrocities. The courier, Captain “Tommy” Davies, was refused help by the British Legation in Latvia when he reached there. Davies found a boat to take him to Sweden. When his own Legation heard of his plans, it even telegraphed ahead to warn the British Embassy in Stockholm against protecting this “spy” and antagonizing the Swedes. The message was sent in clear language, endangering Davies, who had quickly realized that he was an inconvenient eyewitness to the Nazi brutality that Chamberlain’s group would rather not know about.

  Even with these bitter memories, the Baker Street Irregulars dared not push too hard. As planners of secret warfare, they vowed “to do those things which assisted in the execution of His Majesty’s Government policy but which could not be acknowledged,” as their Oath of Secrecy had it. The emphasis was on loyalty to the King, obedience to the Crown. Since Gubbins’s return from Poland, a new German Governor-General had started to eliminate all “unnecessary” Poles, and to reduce the rest to slavery. During this first winter, Polish intellectuals, aristocrats, officers, priests, and Jews were being murdered. Yet, in the face of proof that Hitler was studiously acting out the wild dreams of Mein Kampf, Chamberlain continued to hope for the best.

  The Swedish “peace envoy,” Dahlerus, fed these hopes. Nothing should be done, he told Chamberlain, to provoke the Führer. Then the British could later make a deal with other Nazi leaders and isolate the little madman. Dahlerus came to London with such frequency that Halifax voiced the fear that “his visits, which cannot be kept secret, will inevitably cause misunderstanding.”

  The visits were not misunderstood by Churchill’s rebels. They knew the truth about the Swedish “businessman.” They knew his job was to gull British leaders until their hesitancy turned them into easy prey. The fact was that Dahlerus was in the power of the Nazi Air Minister, Göring, because his wife owned large estates inside the Third Reich which could be confiscated by a stroke of the pen. Göring had so far taken care that Mrs. Dahlerus retained her valuable properties in return for her husband’s co-operation. During his “peace missions,” Dahlerus carried the plea from the King of Sweden to the King of England to “stop Stephenson” sabotaging Swedish supplies to Germany.

  Such peacemongers exercised more influence than was recognized at the time. It was a well-kept secret throughout the war that Prime Minister Chamberlain considered that there was a possibility of replacing Hitler with Göring. “This was to be achieved by relaxing British pressure on Germany,” Stephenson recalled later. “Of course, Hitler and Göring were working together in this maneuver. They played on the weak-minded and simpletons, using intermediaries like Dahlerus to persuade us that if we were soft on Germany, there was a good chance that Nazism would be soft on us.

  “Chamberlain really thought Göring might take over Germany in a transitional government. The longer he played with this idea, the longer Britain avoided a direct confrontation. That suited Hitler.

  “But the peacemongers served another purpose by waking up a few hardheaded leaders in Britain and America to the realities of a war like none other. It was a war of treachery, with weapons of lies and deceit. The final and biggest battlefield was to be America. If Hitler could keep it ‘neutral on his side,’ using the Dahlerus-style strategy, he could conquer the world.”

  12

  In mid-April when wind and rain swept through the bleak brickyards of Bletchley, the townsfolk noticed fewer academics bicycling along the winding streets. Up at the Park, odd scraps of intelligence were coming in to hold the scholars’ attention. Other cryptanalytic teams were breaking low-grade codes, locating enemy units, and interpreting information gleaned from diplomatic dispatches.

  The search for answers to Enigma was a frantic race against time. The other teams had detected fresh movements of the blitzkrieg forces. But high-grade German military orders were fed exclusively now through the enemy’s hundreds of portable Enigmas. The most brilliant mathematicians could not work fast enough on intercepts by using the technique of first discovering what symbols appeared most frequently. A computer would make the calculations in a fraction of the time. This seems elementary today. Then, it occurred to few; and among those few, not many were aware that it could be done electronically.

  Stephenson was convinced a computer for Enigma could be mass-produced in the United States. The prototype of such a computer had been made. What he wanted was a series of computers linked to banks of Enigma duplicates. In this way, the intercepted enemy ciphers might be handled hour by hour to get answers in time to make the right countermoves.

  Meanwhile, other Bletchleyites mapped the new German distribution of forces. Two mighty air armadas, Luftflotte II and Luftflotte III, with 3,000 warplanes, were shifting to bases in an arc westward. German armored units, paratroop and infantry groups drew up in positions from which to strike across the rest of free Europe on the way to the English Channel.

  Britain was stripped almost naked of home defenses. She had sent an expeditionary force, with front-line air cover, to France at the out-break of war in 1939, and now these forces were in great jeopardy. It was cold comfort to be forewarned of Hitler’s next offensives. Even if British and French commanders had believed some educated guesses from Bletchley, they were not equipped physically or mentally to move quickly to block Hitler. The lack of preparation under sick and ineffective leaders was described by George Orwell in England Your England:

  After 1934 it was known that Germany was rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was coming. After Munich it was merely a question of how soon the war would begin. In September 1939 war broke out. Eight months later it was discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British army was barely beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers to supply all the officers. After a year of war the regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even, previously, been a shortage of uniforms—this in one of the greatest woollen-goods producing countries in the world!

  With that record, why should the British be bailed out by an American president? Roosevelt would risk political suicide.

  “We need Rockefellers and Rothschilds,” grumbled Churchill. “We need gold. Do you know we have none?” He was talking to his intelligence chiefs in Room 39 beneath his office as First Lord. Near him was the desk of Commander Ian Fleming and the baize door of the Director of Naval Intelligence. The tall westerly windows were crissc
rossed with sticky tape to reduce splinters from bomb blast. Through the diamonds he could see the garden of No. 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s house, which seemed to Churchill still a million miles away. Room 39 was known as “the Zoo,” because of its apparent untidiness and the peculiarities of its unconventional inhabitants. Around its marble fireplace and iron coal scuttles gathered those odd and dedicated men for whom there never had been a Phony War.

  “We need,” Churchill concluded after a dissertation on American politics that sounded like the rehearsal of a speech, “to fire up the boilers of the greatest engine in history. Tell them we have the guts. We’ll fight.” He turned away. “With God’s help, America may escape the trials and tribulations that lie ahead . . . provided we can survive here in England.”

  “I can find the Rockefellers and they’ll support us,” said Stephenson. “We can offer our secret intelligence in return for help. It has to be done at the President’s level. There have been intelligence breakthroughs in the United States that would advance our own efforts. The President would have to authorize disclosure. There are the means to produce, in America, the sophisticated equipment we need for intelligence weapons. The President can be told what that equipment is needed for, so that we don’t have to explain the purpose to the manufacturers. But the President will have to be sure that our intelligence reports are accurate.”

  Admiral Hall, technically in retirement, looked down. Having devised the means to convince Americans in World War I that the Zimmermann Telegram was genuine—without giving away the secret of the cryptographers’ existence—he could speak with authority: “The real source must be disguised from everyone not directly involved.”