A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Some old-guard civil servants whispered that Dalton would run a “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” They feared it would become a monster with concealed and unaccountable funds, dangerous and unorthodox weapons, and free to cause political mayhem abroad, even to the extent of political assassination. That, of course, was what Churchill anticipated; but he felt confident that he could curb any wilder impulses. Ministry headquarters in Berkeley Square quietly sucked in poets and professors, sportsmen and journalists, and others not already equipped with cloak and dagger. One recruit was Eric Maschwitz, who composed the wartime song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Those who really occupied Berkeley Square adopted the song as their theme.

  Churchill’s eleventh-hour rise to power has been described as a miracle that saved the free world. That Churchill might prove a disaster, however, was the view of Alexander Cadogan, the head of the Foreign Office. Others shared his misgivings. It needs to be remembered that such civil servants had never allowed private doubts to influence their actions. The first Earl of Cadogan had been Director of Intelligence to Churchill’s illustrious ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. On the eve of battle, Marlborough seemingly insulted Cadogan by throwing down his glove. That night, Marlborough said he wished to site a battery of guns where he had thrown down the gauntlet. “It’s there now,” replied Cadogan, who had understood what looked to the generals like an insulting act. “Nothing disturbed his fidelity to his chief or the mutual comprehension between them,” commented Churchill.

  Beside him, when he took over, were secret-warfare chiefs whose mutual comprehension was never more needed. Europe was vanishing into the darkness of a tyranny without precedent. The art of the guerrilla offered some faint hope of rising resistance, something better than the degrading and demoralizing prospect of a mere struggle to keep alive. Human endurance and ingenuity were to be pitted against military authority pursuing a scheme of racial purification that depended upon the extermination of “inferiors,” the enslavement of others, selective breeding, and the worship of a new kind of superman.

  It was not by chance that the vulnerabilities of this Nazi authority were being exposed at Bletchley. Jewish intellectuals and refugees from persecution were among those who began a routine to recover some coded German signals fed through the Enigma chain. A procedure was established that helped the Duty Watch to fasten upon the particular code—that is, the arrangement of Enigma drums—being used by a specific German network (the Air Force in Norway, for example) before the senders switched to another code. An elaborate system of telegraph and telephone lines between Bletchley and service chiefs in London was brought into operation and made secure against accidental betrayal by interception if sent via radio.

  The change in Britain’s leadership had produced a surge of confidence. In code-breaking, the consequences of the sudden lift in morale were spectacular. Mental blocks dissolved. A mechanical contrivance was built that reduced the work of the mathematicians. It would be some time before the enemy’s secrets were laid bare by retrieving the German High Command’s orders on a reasonably regular basis. But there was a sense of a breakthrough, sufficient for Stephenson to propose that intelligence distilled from this source be labeled “Top-secret Ultra.” Under this label would be filed only that intelligence which came from Bletchley and sources so highly confidential that no more than selected segments could be communicated to battle commanders, and then often in disguised form. ULTRA reports would be confided to the smallest possible number of British leaders, to reduce the risk of a leak, and to one other: the President of the United States.

  14

  In Parliament, Neville Chamberlain was confronted by a member pointing a finger and quoting Cromwell: “You have sat too long here. . . . In the name of God, go!”

  Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, a few days before Hitler’s armies swept to the English Channel in a series of blitzkriegs. “At long last,” Churchill was to write later, “I could act with full authority in all directions.” One of his first orders was to bring together the work of separate agencies concerned with the U.S. Embassy leaks. The gravity of the case could be judged by the priority given to it during this time of greatest danger. On the day the police came for Tyler Gatewood Kent, the American cipher clerk, British naval officers met in deep galleries carved into the cliffs of Dover and peered doubtfully across the English Channel. Could a fleet of sailing craft and rusty coasters be scraped together to rescue the British Expeditionary Force encircled by German armored forces in Flanders? In the War Office, a Military Intelligence tape machine rapped out a message that seemed to reflect the incoherence of events:

  HOTLERS TROOPS OVERRUN LUXEMBOURG. . . . HOTLER PROCLAIMS FALL OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. HOTLER SAYS HE WILL CRUSH BRITAIN.

  There was a pause and then the machine stuttered again.

  CORRECTION. FOR HOTLER READ HITLER AND THE MEANING WILL BECOME APPARENT.

  Stephenson scanned the wire copy and then, back in London briefly, meditated on the Tyler Kent case. It stank of treachery. He hoped none of it extended to other members of Ambassador Kennedy’s staff.

  The decoded messages to Berlin that first aroused suspicion had been dispatched from the German Ambassador to Rome, Hans Mackensen. Intelligence sources reported that Mackensen got his information from an Italian attaché in London, the Duke of Del Monte. Scotland Yard reported that the Duke of Del Monte patronized a tearoom in London owned by a former Tsarist Russian admiral, whose daughter, Anna Wolkoff, was popular among anti-Semitic pro-Nazi groups. Among her admirers was the same Duke of Westminster who had attacked Churchill in the Savoy. Anna Wolkoff had been followed by counterespionage agents whose job was made easier by the trail she left of sticky-backed labels declaring: “This is a Jew’s War.” These British agents were concerned with England’s fifth column, a term coined four years before, during the Spanish Civil War, when it was said that the four columns of insurgents marching upon Madrid had a “fifth column” of sympathizers inside the city ready to betray it.

  A watch had also been kept on Anna’s apartment by MI-5, a branch of Military Intelligence then responsible for counterespionage, because she was listed as a member of the Right Club, which distributed pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish propaganda. Only now, when MI-5’s report was put beside the results of other investigations, did it become evident that Anna was a link in the chain between the Embassy and Berlin. She was visited often at night by a U.S. Embassy code clerk. He was Tyler Kent, who handled the secret cables dispatched to Washington in the State Department’s Gray Code, said to be unbreakable.

  Had Kent been acting on his own, inside the Embassy? Anna Wolkoff’s background revealed a long history of collaboration with pro-Nazi diplomats. She wrote letters containing information to be used in propaganda broadcasts from Berlin by the British traitor William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. She was the source of material wirelessed to Rumania, through another diplomatic channel, to be sent on to Berlin. She was the means by which Kent passed on the contents of the Churchill-Roosevelt cables to the Italian attaché, who sent them to the German Ambassador in Rome.

  All of these pieces had been in different hands. Put together, they completed a broad picture.

  Even during the week before Kent’s arrest, a sensitive message from Churchill was duplicated along the London-Rome-Berlin chain. He had cabled Roosevelt that Britain and France had passed from being Hitler’s hateful “victors of Versailles” to the lowly level of being defeated in battle and divided. The Führer must have enjoyed reading: “TO POTUS: The scene has darkened swiftly. . . . The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood. We must expect, though it is not yet certain, that Mussolini will hurry in to share the loot of civilization. We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and airborne troops, in the near future. . . . You may have a completely subjugated Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear. All I ask now is that you sho
uld proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces.” It was signed “Former Naval Person.”

  In another message, the details were given of the heavy losses Britain had suffered among warships. There followed a full disclosure of Britain’s urgent need of forty or fifty outdated American destroyers.

  It was the last time Hitler got such cheering news handed him on this silver plate. Stephenson was deeply involved in negotiations for the loan of the American ships. He recognized that the intercept was almost word for word Churchill’s coded plea. There was no further doubt about the origin of the leak, which was the U.S. code clerk and not Ambassador Kennedy.

  The Ambassador then had to disown his own man. Standing in the Kennedy house near Kensington Palace on the evening of the raid on Kent’s apartment, he agreed to Lord Halifax’s proposal that Kent should be dismissed from the U.S. Foreign Service so that British authorities could take legal action. Kennedy telephoned President Roosevelt that night to report “our most secret code has become useless. Just when France is collapsing, the United States has to suspend its confidential communications with diplomatic missions throughout the world.” He added that if the United States had been at war, he would have recommended that Kent be shot as a traitor.

  The trial of Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff was conducted in secrecy. They were sentenced to prison terms on charges of communicating confidential documents that might help the enemy. The case was hushed up because of its many implications, not the least being that Kent justified his actions on patriotic grounds and felt that it was Roosevelt who was guilty of treason. Kent was a well-educated young man, a career diplomat with an unusual amount of experience abroad. No matter how angrily Kennedy condemned him now, many Americans shared his isolationist feelings.

  Ambassador Kennedy had said that Kent’s activities compromised all American diplomatic communications. He did not know that Stephenson had made arrangements in Washington to bring an alternative system into operation. President Roosevelt’s instruction to J. Edgar Hoover to form the closest possible alliance with Stephenson’s intelligence clients had been followed on the American side as swiftly as the FBI’s resources would allow. Everyone had been waiting for the day Churchill would take command. From now onward, Ambassador Kennedy would be bypassed. New channels of communication would open up between the Baker Street Irregulars and their companions in the United States.

  These rebels on both sides of the Atlantic moved cautiously. They feared betrayal by men in much higher positions than Tyler Kent’s—uninformed men who would justify their actions in the name of patriotism, too. Ironically, the British, who were at least in the midst of war, had the most reason to tread warily. Kennedy’s good friend Neville Chamberlain had been deposed, but his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, was still active. Even while Churchill was moving into the post of prime minister, Halifax was anticipating the consequences of a French collapse. He commended a peace proposal “that will get us better terms now than we might get in three months’ time.” Mussolini had offered to negotiate a settlement with the Nazis without affecting Britain’s independence, provided Fascist Italy could have the island of Malta and free play in the Mediterranean. If Britain would display a reasonable attitude and allow Germany and Italy to share the Middle East and Africa, peace could be secured.

  Halifax and Chamberlain tried repeatedly to have this proposal endorsed by the British War Cabinet. “Had they collaborated, it would not have been long before our anti-Nazi activities became anti-British,” said Stephenson.

  The latest peace offer had originated in Rome while the German Ambassador was enciphering the last piece of information to leak from the U.S. Embassy in London: Roosevelt’s frank explanation of his difficulty in letting Churchill have the forty or fifty antiquated destroyers. Stephenson now argued forcibly for the secure and co-ordinated intelligence alliance that would bring together those who opposed Nazism, no matter what their nationality, using the Tyler Kent investigation to make his case. Ambassador Kennedy had been cleared of any responsibility for the leak, but his testimony before a closed hearing of the House and Senate committees on Military Affairs put him in the same category as Halifax. That testimony was given shortly before Stephenson’s first flying visit to Washington. In it, Kennedy was emphatic that Nazi Germany could not be beaten. He had recorded his view that Churchill was scheming and unscrupulous and “willing to blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans, if that would get the Americans in.”

  Churchill had leaned over backward to avoid impetuous actions that might alarm or antagonize the Americans. Events now forced his hand. The Prime Minister of France, Paul Reynaud, telephoned to say in English: “We have been defeated. We are beaten. We have lost the battle.”

  If Britain could hang on for a few weeks, if Roosevelt were not turned out of the White House by the defeatists, if the United States would provide arms at least for the secret armies (beginning with those auxiliary units preparing to conduct partisan warfare, if necessary, against the Nazis in Britain), there was still hope for freedom. To the Baker Street Irregulars, Churchill issued the orders to prepare for guerrilla operations. A body was to be created “to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage,—To Set Europe Ablaze.”

  Official action was delayed two months while Stephenson explained the proposal to President Roosevelt, for a blazing Europe might include an occupied Britain whose guerrillas would take direction from New York.

  What seemed in April an academic question was now a probability. Stephenson had not exaggerated when he told the President that it would take Hitler little time to subjugate his unprepared neighbors, and the forces of freedom a long time to liberate them. “The Führer is not just a lunatic,” Stephenson had said. “He’s an evil genius. The weapons in his armory are like nothing in history. His propaganda is sophisticated. His control of the people is technologically clever. He has torn up the military textbooks and written his own. His strategy is to spread terror, fear, and mutual suspicion.

  “There will be a period of occupation when we shall have to keep up the morale of those who are not taken to the death and slave camps, and build up an intelligence system so that we can identify the enemy’s weak points. We’ll have to fall back upon human resources and trust that these are superior to machines.”

  PART

  II

  FIGHT ON

  “Fight on, my men, Sir Andrew sayes,

  A little ime hurt, but yett not slaine,

  Ile but lye downe and bleede awhile,

  And then ile rise and fight againe”

  —The Ballad of Sir Andrew Barton

  15

  The German armies were flooding across France. There was every indication that the French would sign a separate peace. Then Germany would occupy Paris and the industrial centers, tolerating a “neutral” French administration in the south.

  Churchill shuttled between England and France in his desperate attempts to shore up Allied morale, and was shattered to discover it was Reynaud’s mistress who was really influencing decisions. The Countess Hélène de Portes had sapped whatever courage remained in the French Premier as she lay crying hysterically on his bed, pleading only to be left alone.

  Stephenson flew with Churchill on one of the five grueling journeys made by the new Prime Minister, pitchforked in his mid-sixties into the role of war lord while his armies tried to escape from the enemy’s trap. Every available vessel capable of crossing the English Channel formed an almost continuous stream between Dover and the bombed beaches of Dunkirk. In Paris, Reynaud knew nothing of the evacuation. He nodded numbly when Churchill, who seemed to him a pink little old man with wispy hair and frail artistic hands, said: “Better that the last of us should fall fighting than to linger on as slaves.”

  Churchill stumped up and down Reynaud’s bedroom. There was “the great probability that Hitler will rule the world,” he said. “We must think toget
her of how to strike and strike again, no matter what the cost nor how long the trials ahead.” He faced the French Premier and then sat down heavily. His changing moods raced like clouds across his baby face. He was in turn sulky, tearful, and violent. None of it did any good. Reynaud in reply chanted the pace of Hitler’s victories: Poland in twenty-six days, Norway in twenty-eight days, Denmark in twenty-four hours, Holland in five days, and Luxembourg in twelve hours. He turned sad luminous eyes on Churchill. “Belgium is finished. Now France . . .”

  Back in London, Churchill told Parliament: “We have but one aim, and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this, nothing will turn us—nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate. . . . We shall never surrender.” He spoke while his commanders counted their losses. Britain was virtually defenseless. Her expeditionary forces had left their weapons in conquered France. But the London tabloid Daily Mirror proclaimed in banner headlines: BLOODY MARVELOUS. Instead of only 50,000 troops, the makeshift fleet had evacuated 338,226 fighting men. It was called “the Miracle of Dunkirk.” Churchill swiftly reminded his people that “we have suffered a catastrophic defeat.”

  He served warning that Hitler’s weapons of subversion and bribery would fail, and hinted at the preparations of the Baker Street Irregulars by the promise that “if this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving,” the struggle would continue until “the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

  Six days later, President Roosevelt publicly replied. “We will pursue two obvious and simultaneous courses: we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and at the same time we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we in America may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency. . . .” He took an enormous personal risk in openly committing the United States in the face of domestic antiwar feeling.