A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  “This was his first tremendous decision—to back the seemingly hopeless cause of Britain when everyone thought it was already lost,” Stephenson recalled later. He understood the President’s difficulties better than most British leaders.

  Noel Coward, who had been snatched out of Paris from under German guns, glimpsed the short, slight Canadian at one of the curious cloak-and-dagger offices that overnight sprang up around Queen Anne’s Gate in London. Coward had been working with French intelligence. “When the roof fell in,” he said, “I suddenly realized we’d been playing games. One idea was to drop leaflets on Berlin. They would carry slogans like ‘See—the Führer cannot stop Allied bombers!’ It seemed quite pathetic when I got back to England. I thought—O dear, they’ll be twiddling their thumbs here, too, until the tanks reach Westminster. I had to go to St. Ermin’s Hotel in Caxton Street, very appropriately positioned between the House of Lords and Victoria Railway Station. I had to meet a contact in the foyer. I waited in this squalid place and eventually a man said ‘Follow me.’ I thought we’d go back into the street to some secret address. Instead, he wheeled me round and into an elevator. It was only labeled to go up three floors. To my absolute astonishment it went to the fourth instead. An immense fellow guarded the place, all scrunched up inside a porter’s uniform and looking very uncomfortable. I found out later his name was Cornelius.

  “Well this was the—ah, the Special Operations Executive. What we called later the Baker Street Irregulars. Some chap was saying President Roosevelt wanted us to do his fighting. And Little Bill was there, very calm, with those sort of hooded eyes watching everything. And all he said was—‘We could have done with Roosevelt here these past few years.’ ”

  Stephenson was engaged at this time in hot controversy about the future handling of ULTRA’S reports from Bletchley. ULTRA covered many sources on intelligence but its principal product came from the daily deciphering of German orders coded through Enigma machines. Informed comments and analyses accompanied these decoded interceptions. There were fears that the Germans were torturing Polish and French prisoners who knew about the captured Heydrich-Enigma. About a dozen senior intelligence officers in Warsaw and Paris had at least some knowledge of the British prize and might disclose it, inadvertently or under severe interrogation. If the Germans discovered that Enigma was already in British hands, they had only to switch to another system to destroy most of ULTRA’S usefulness. (Official postwar investigations were to prove that nobody revealed the secret, placing British and Americans in the debt of those who never talked—a debt that in the light of events must seem irredeemable.)

  With everyone on tenterhooks, Stephenson had the unenviable task of arguing for further disclosures to the Americans, thus increasing the risk of warning the enemy.

  ULTRA was still stabbing in the dark. Bletchley cryptographers were coping with dozens of different Enigma ciphers or sets of couplings in use at the same time. For example, the German repair-and-maintenance network in Occupied Denmark would transmit daily routine orders on an Enigma cipher different from that in use by German U-boats in the Atlantic. Furthermore, the Germans had many variations of high-grade ciphers. At Bletchley, it was necessary to work out the order of priority in which these intercepted messages should be processed, lest a truly significant and urgent order be set aside while the specialists tackled something that would prove to be of minor importance. Even the word “specialists” is misleading. They were still learning on the job. What some achieved was a filing system that, as it grew, became invaluable. Out of the mass of material that did get decoded, indexers underlined what struck them as key words, transferred these to files, and cross-indexed them. This ever-expanding library led to sudden revelations. An intelligence officer plowing through a routine message might strike a word—perhaps the name of a solid-fuel propellant—that rang a bell. Seeking the word in records, he might find an earlier reference to the propellant in connection with weapon experiments. The propellant was being shipped to Denmark. This suggested either a new test range or the introduction of the new weapon into naval service in certain vessels thought to be based in Denmark. This detective work depended upon that initial moment of word association, which is why Bletchley clung to scholars with encyclopedic memories.

  There was an awful element of chance in all this. Though Stephenson knew some of the work could be done mechanically, Britain still did not have such equipment. Meanwhile, the batteries of human brains had to be enlarged again. Why not keep American experts on tap? Not friendly professors in faraway cities, but American intelligence officers moved to Bletchley and available twenty-four hours a day. A revolutionary concept, it seemed. If ULTRA was vital to survival, sharing it with Americans would be an act of trust. Roosevelt knew, as quickly as Churchill, whatever British intelligence deduced about German intentions. But the President was an exception. Should the burden of such knowledge be placed on neutral officers? “Is there even such a creature as a professional American intelligence officer outside their service agencies?” demanded one hostile British admiral. “If American academics are brought in, will they submit to the harsh discipline of secrecy and its accompanying hardships of isolation?”

  Stephenson argued for the acquisition of American brains while planning to solve mechanically the cipher and index problems that drained Bletchley’s human energies. He proposed that British Tabulating be the cover for a computer to be called “Colossus.” Smaller and better versions would then be constructed in the United States with expert British aid. Computers were something new. Computers powered electrically were unknown. He had International Business Machines in mind as the U.S. manufacturer. How was IBM to be kept in ignorance of the true purpose? The computers were called, in conversation, “bombes,” from French intelligence terminology, a sad echo of the days—now abruptly ended—when Paris was a center of cryptological research. The first British-built models were assembled near Bletchley, but it soon became apparent that production must take place away from enemy bombers, in the United States, where improvements could be made with the help of American mathematicians.

  With France and presumably the rest of Europe cut off, what sources would there be for other intelligence officers? Stephenson could think only of the Americas. The neutrals of Latin America and the United States included millions of migrants whose first language would be that of a country occupied by the enemy. More important, these “hyphenated Americans” would have firsthand knowledge of local territories, Nazi-run factories and mines. They would know who could be trusted to help create secret units within the occupied countries. They would have to be trained out of sight, and without breaking neutrality laws. The obvious place was the Canadian wilderness.

  These considerations kept Stephenson busy in May of 1940. It was the month marking the end of the Phony War. To all outward appearances, Britain had been taken by surprise. The Baker Street Irregulars, the guerrilla-warfare experts, and the intelligence chiefs were obliged to receive in silence the jeers about British muddle and unpreparedness.

  “We were squeezing into a week what normally took a year,” Stephenson said later. “We swept aside the dangerous rigidity of bureaucracy, the thumb-twiddlers and military dinosaurs. I daresay we made some enemies. . . .” He had hoped for a conventional fighting command for himself. He was forty-four, but danger seemed to lend him the energy of youth. Churchill asked him to a private dinner. The manner of invitation was cordial, casual, and discreet. “My dear Bill—We have matters to discuss. Pray come as you are, to the Beaver’s, seven tonight. WC.”

  It was a fine evening, with the washed-blue skies that come in late May and early June. He decided to walk, to take his time, perhaps to divert past the sandbagged colossus that was the BBC, already a radio beacon of hope for millions under Nazi rule. He hummed the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, translating the rhythm into Morse code. Dot-dot-dot-dash . . . V. A stirring composition. It would make a dramatic signal. V—for Victory. A prelude to BBC
broadcasts in every European language. The signature of secret armies. The leaders would listen for it and rally to the V symbol. Dot-dot-dot-dash . . . He’d mention the idea to Churchill.

  He passed the Yorkshire Grey, an old drinking house favored by American correspondents. It carried a sign on the door, quoting Queen Victoria: “Please understand there is no pessimism in this house and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.”

  A barrage balloon wobbled out of Regent’s Park. It contained just enough gas to give it the drooping look of an exhausted elephant. Such balloons rose when an air raid was anticipated, their cables forming a steel mesh for blundering bombers. A patrol of Boy Scouts stood outside the divisional police station in Mayfair. On their bicycles, they would carry messages between posts whenever communications were knocked out by bombs.

  “Adversity,” Stephenson mused, “suits the British. They like their roads to be crooked, their trains slow, their phone lines crossed. In peace, they’re in permanent resistance to authority. In war, they breathe a sigh of relief at getting back to normal. In solitude they feel happiest. In isolation they go back to being islanders.”

  The little man walked as if he had springs in his feet. The shimmer of young foliage painted with delicate green the sooty trunks of London trees. A flower girl on Portland Place called out: “Cheer up, mate, you ain’t dead ‘til yer buried!” With sunlight shining from time to time through the billowing clouds, he made his way down Regent Street and turned into a lane between the grimy buttressed buildings leading to Stornoway House, a forbidding mansion.

  Churchill met him at the door and took the newcomer, still clutching a nosegay he had purchased, by the arm. “Dinner first. Then talk.”

  The laird of Stornoway was host—Lord Beaverbrook, another pugnacious little Canadian. Among the chiefs of war at the table were Frenchmen about to fly back to what remained of their country, and Hugh (“Boom”) Trenchard, who had preserved the Royal Air Force during the muddleheaded years of appeasement. For him, a struggle for mastery of the sky lay ahead. His best fighter aircraft had been squandered over France, and he thought privately that he could not resist a full-scale German attack in the air for more than forty-eight hours.

  The French listened glumly. Churchill, who had once sketched “The Timetable of a Nightmare,” projecting a German advance upon Londen, now forecast a conflict of unutterable brutality, with women and children drawn in, and torture and treachery as weapons. “Whatever you may do,” Churchill declared to the French, “we shall fight on forever and ever and ever.”

  Stephenson sat mostly silent. When he did speak, he seemed to have anticipated Churchill. He compressed an idea with the brevity of an ancient. The older man bubbled with schoolboy enthusiasm. Words were food and drink to Churchill, and sentences had a habit of reappearing in carefully composed speeches—“We shall fight on forever and ever and ever. . . .”

  When port and cigars began to circulate, Churchill rose and beckoned Stephenson to join him alone beside the heavily draped windows. “Winston started by pointing a finger directly at me. ‘You know what you must do. We have discussed it so fully from all angles, there is a complete fusion of minds. You are appointed my personal representative. You will be backed by all the resources at my command.’ ”

  Stephenson was being given extraordinary independence and power. He was to direct His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Services and a great deal more. He was to move against the enemy wherever and whenever he saw fit, to take action through covert diplomacy or clandestine agencies without seeking prior approval from the War Cabinet. He would be protected only to the degree that the purpose of his movements would be known to very few.

  This was not at all what Stephenson had wanted. He was, however, best qualified to build, in America, the invisible fortress that would sustain resistance to Hitler. The logic was inescapable. Britain now depended upon an appeal to the romantic imagination that in the past had saved her from seemingly certain disaster. Of weapons there were almost none. Hitler was preparing to transform Berlin into the colossal capital of the world. “He has a good chance of conquering the world,” said Churchill. “All he needs is that a small island capitulate. Tell the President that!”

  There was no official title at first for the new organization. Those in the know called it “BSC.” The use of code names, initials, and homely phrases like “the firm” or “our friends” made conversation possible in awkward circumstances. The Baker Street Irregulars had become a club. Under the pressure of war, there was little time to check credentials. You had to assume that a member of the club had passed muster, subscribed to certain ideals, and played by the rules. The Baker Street Club was the handiest jargon. BSC became dignified as British Security Coordination only when it was obliged later to register with the U.S. State Department. It sounded harmless.

  It sounds anything but harmless today. BSC rigged its head-quarters in New York in haste. The invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Stephenson’s mandate, when it was finally defined, ran to hundreds of pages, covering activities that ranged from operations against Americans helping Britain’s enemies, to policing U.S. ports, to supervising the overthrow of a pro-Nazi government. BSC conducted guerrilla warfare from secret headquarters in the privileged sanctuary of neutral U.S. soil. The first priority was to secure arms and U.S. naval protection where possible. Stephenson’s mandate assumed Britain might be conquered and Roosevelt would let the secret-warfare chiefs continue the fight from U.S. bases, linked with anti-Nazi guerrillas in British redoubts.

  German plans to invade Britain, and in time to control an empire that girdled the globe, were reported by Bletchley as ULTRA became more efficient. ULTRA had demonstrated its effectiveness when British expeditionary forces escaped through Dunkirk. Roosevelt knew this, and must have been influenced thereby to tolerate Stephenson’s operations when they might have become politically embarrassing to the White House.

  ULTRA’S part in the miracle of Dunkirk was not central. Its usefulness in this period was in impressing on Roosevelt the fact that the British still had wit and cunning to make up for what they lacked in arms.

  Hitler and his commanders failed to crush British forces trapped in Europe because DYNAMO, as the evacuation of Dunkirk was code-named, took them by surprise. Historians later puzzled and argued over the mystery of why the Führer let the British escape, when the destruction of their armies would have led to an easy victory over Britain, with incalculable consequences.

  The real explanation is that the Bletchley code breakers, by a combination of familiarity with German military thinking, ULTRA’S still incomplete retrieval of orders, and analysis of other German signals, were able to guess German intentions and even to predict some German operations prior to the fall of France. Thus, during most of May, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay was mobilizing 848 captains among fisher-men, yachtsmen, merchant seamen, and Royal Navy officers for DYNAMO. Ramsay ensured that every ship, no matter how small, would get stores, fuel, provisions, and charts to cross the twenty-four miles from Dover to Dunkirk, to which the British expeditionary forces were told to withdraw. The rest was up to each captain.

  DYNAMO surprised the Germans because it seemed impossible that the British could improvise such an evacuation in the midst of a blitzkrieg. Furthermore, Hitler knew that Chamberlain and Halifax wanted Britain to sue for peace. But Chamberlain was no longer prime minister. Halifax was hanging on as foreign secretary in name only. Nevertheless, the Chamberlain-Halifax proposals to end the war continued to tantalize the Führer as late as May 28, 1940 (according to the secret British War Cabinet report of that date, disclosed in 1971). Hitler assumed that the Chamberlain-Halifax appeasers still dominated British policy. On June 4, when German forces finally bore down in great numbers upon the dwindling Dunkirk perimeter, Hitler realized that he had been outwitted on the battlefield and misled politically. He thereupon ordered the destruction of the Royal Air Force as a prelude to the invasion of B
ritain. His party comrade Hermann Göring judged that his Luftwaffe would take four days to knock Britain’s Fighter Command out of the air.

  There was a pause in the German onslaught after Dunkirk. Historians may write that it occurred because Hitler still hoped to negotiate a settlement with Britain. President Roosevelt knew better, because he was getting, through the FBI, from Bletchley, a regular summary of what German military formations were actually doing. Troops were being concentrated in ports from Norway to France, air divisions were moved to bases that brought all England within bombing range. The long lists of German personnel postings alone confirmed that Hitler meant what he was saying in private, but overheard, directions to his commanders: Britain is to be occupied.

  During this lull, Stephenson proceeded to build up BSC. New York was to be the hub because it was the commercial and communications center of the free world. From it, all forms of secret warfare could be directed, not only against the enemy in occupied territories, but also against Nazi fifth columns in the Americas, where the next attacks could be expected. Secret-warfare specialists and inventions that could be developed with the speed and in the quantity possible only in America began to flow from Britain to the United States. If Britain fell, New York would become the new source of moral and physical support for secret armies that in the early stages would have no contact with one another. And if Britain did not fall, New York would still be needed as the nerve center of resistance.

  Historians may have later decided that peace was in the air during that lull. But even without the facts imparted by ULTRA, ordinary people in Britain knew otherwise. Ironically, England was enjoying an unusually beautiful summer. Rebecca West, whose special knowledge of the Balkans drew her into the company of Baker Street Irregulars, described the mood in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “Under the unstained heaven of that perfect summer, curiously starred with the silver elephantines of the balloon barrage, the people sat on the seats among the roses [in Regent’s Park] . . . their faces white. Some of them walked among the rose-beds, with a special earnestness looking down on the bright flowers and inhaling the scent, as if to say, ‘That is what roses are like, that is how they smell. We must remember that, down in the darkness.’ . . . Most of these people believed, and rightly, that they were presently to be subjected to a form of attack more horrible than had ever before been directed against the common man. Let nobody belittle them by pretending they were fearless. Not being as the OX and the ass, they were horribly afraid. But their pale lips did not part to say the words that would have given them security and dishonour.”