A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  ULTRA had a different story. On Friday, June 6, Stephenson and Donovan were driven to Woburn Abbey, on the Duke of Bedford’s estate. This pleasantly rolling countryside was a favorite spot for young lovers, who knew a score of public footpaths where nobody would disturb them for hours. Now the woodlands were stiff with security men dressed as gamekeepers. Commandos in patched coveralls bicycled the narrow lanes or stood behind the ancient oaks fringing the wheat fields that stretched to the gates of Bletchley Park and the huts inside. Between there and the venerable abbey bicycled a few eccentric figures. Donovan recognized some as specialists in psychological warfare, then a new branch of aggressive intelligence operations. Without knowing about the gigantic bugging of the Nazi High Command, they received some of ULTRA’s processed information for “black propaganda” broadcasts designed to mislead or demoralize the enemy.

  The chief of British Political Intelligence, Reginald Leeper, addressed this curious collection of what appeared to be dissipated schoolmasters. “Gentlemen, I have been authorized by the Prime Minister to reveal to you a piece of secret information which has been known to Mr. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff for several weeks. He permits me to tell you—and you only—in order that we may concert our plans, that Hitler is to attack Soviet Russia. The actual invasion is expected around the middle of June. The estimate is Sunday the twenty-second, which is to say two weeks and two days from now. You will not make notes of what I tell you, nor can you prepare any specific action until the day itself. You are each responsible for sections that will come into play when the Germans move. We have identified twenty-nine divisions under von Leeb in East Prussia who will advance from the north; fifty divisions under von Bock to the south on either side of the Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow line; forty-two divisions under von Rundstedt to move from Lublin towards Kiev. . . .”

  The days slipped by. Donovan felt the Germans would achieve complete surprise. The British could not divulge to Stalin the unimpeachable sources of their information. Instead, they tried to convince the Russians of the impending attack on the basis of a multiplicity of leaks from other quarters. “If the British had sent the Kremlin the precise German military orders as they were intercepted,” Donovan reported later to Roosevelt, “Stalin might have faced reality. But the British regard the whole Bletchley apparatus as far too secret. They feel they can use their information to gain advantage in other ways.”

  On Friday, June 20, two days before the Wehrmacht moved, Churchill worked on a speech to be broadcast to the world when the attacking forces rolled into Russia. It was to be one of the most politically significant declarations of his life. Postwar historians would be puzzled by the amount of time the Prime Minister spent on it, unaware as they were of Bletchley and Churchill’s foreknowledge. It seemed as if he squandered precious hours fussing about the possibility of some German offensive in the east when he should have been dealing with actual events and real crises closer to home. Hitler had that very day proclaimed that “the siege of England” would be intensified. The War Cabinet was worrying about the new German techniques of invasion from the air, so devastatingly demonstrated in Crete. British forces in the Middle East were suffering new setbacks. In the Battle of the Atlantic, a record number of ships had been sunk that week. Warships that should have been available for escort duties were spread thin—eleven had been sunk during the disastrous Crete campaign. Yet here was Churchill pondering a new policy on Russia, a nation still officially opposed to Britain’s continuation of the war. The historians did not know, of course, that the Prime Minister already had the date and time of attack.

  The speech was long and carefully composed, full of grave themes and weighty arguments. It was written before even the Russians themselves knew about the German betrayal of their pact. Churchill polished the phrases that summer’s day in his Elizabethan manor at Chequers, using that curious dithyrambic style that fascinated Roosevelt when Stephenson showed him the draft:

  I see the Russian soldiers standing on the

  threshold of their native land,

  guarding the fields which

  their forefathers tilled from time immemorial.

  I see them guarding their homes where mothers and

  wives pray—

  Ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—

  for the safety of their loved ones, the return of

  the bread-winner, of their champion, of their

  protector. . . .

  I see advancing on all this in hideous onslaught

  the Nazi war-machine, with its clanking,

  heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its

  crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and

  tying-down of a dozen countries.

  I see also the dulled, drilled, docile, brutish

  masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a

  swarm of crawling locusts. . . .

  Behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I

  see that small group of villainous men who plan,

  organize and launch this cataract of horrors upon

  mankind.

  The following Sunday, these words flew around the globe, broadcast in every language, as quickly as the Kremlin learned that it had been taken by surprise. Next day, Churchill had to face his War Cabinet. To protect his sources, he apologized for having acted so swiftly on news of the invasion and said that he would have consulted his colleagues if there had been time. He knew, of course, that consultation would have meant delay and possibly worse. “He held it back from his political advisors lest it be toned down,” reported his personal secretary, Jock Colville. Churchill wanted maximum impact for his declaration that “any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid” on the very day that the German war machine charged across the Soviet border.

  The most remarkable aspect of this coup was that Stalin slept in his summer house on the Black Sea when Churchill spoke. The Russian leader apparently refused to believe the news. For eleven days, nothing was heard from Stalin. Finally, a recording of his voice was broadcast. He did not take full charge of the Russian war effort until the middle of the following month.

  Meanwhile, Bletchley identified every one of the 200 BARBAROSSA generals, their 115 German divisions, eighteen Finnish, fourteen Italian, plus Rumanian, Slovak, Spanish, and Hungarian units. Hitler informed his war chiefs, and thus also Bletchley: “The name of Moscow will vanish forever.” The conquest of all Russia was to take twenty weeks.

  British and American military advisers forecast that Hitler would crush what he called “this brainless clay colossus” before winter. Stephenson disagreed and assured Roosevelt that the diversion of German forces into Yugoslavia had won the precious time required. “It was the Prime Minister’s own inspiration to seize the moment and put heart in the Russians,” Stephenson wrote in a memo to the White House. “Stalin has been shocked into temporary silence by events, and it is our belief that he has suffered a form of nervous breakdown. Mr. Churchill’s prompt offer of all aid is immensely important in winning support from communist partisans already fighting in Nazi-occupied Europe and already unhappy at the Soviet failure to give them support.”

  “In weight of armour, firepower, flexibility and sheer momentum, the Wehrmacht is tuned to a pitch of perfection,” Stephenson reported when he returned to Washington with Donovan that week. “But the German generals are still spellbound by Hitler. If he has miscalculated, as we think, the superstitious Nazi faith in the Fuehrer’s infallibility will be destroyed. The psychological collapse that follows will break German morale.”

  On Roosevelt’s own doorstep was an about-face of Communists in the United States, who had previously resisted aid-to-Britain movements. Stephenson’s men had organized a Fight for Freedom rally in the Golden Gate ballroom in Harlem on the day Russia was attacked. Not having heard yet about BARBAROSSA, a Communist picket line outside waved placards condemning the tools of British and Wall Street imperialism. The black population in the neigh
borhood was urged to march in protest to Washington. When the Fight for Freedom speakers left the ballroom two hours later, they were astonished to find the pickets gone, the posters down, the protest march canceled. By the following day, all Communist publications and publicists were suddenly pro-British, pro-intervention, and, for the first time, unequivocally pro-Roosevelt.

  “The President now fully accepted the concept of offensive intelligence,” Stephenson said later. “The attack on Russia made it politically possible for him to declare Bill Donovan his Coordinator of Information ‘to collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security.’ ”

  The Executive Order of July 11, 1941, made official a situation that was fundamentally irregular. “As much as six months before Pearl Harbor,” the BSC Papers recorded, “we had secured full American participation and collaboration in secret activities directed against the enemy throughout the world.”

  Robert Sherwood, who was a liaison officer between Roosevelt and BSC at this time, noted to Stephenson: “FDR never for a moment overlooked the fact that his actions might lead to his immediate or eventual impeachment. He knew by heart that he was sworn to defend as well as uphold the Constitution. He had the right to judge how to defend. He could take advice, but he was getting into an irregular position in the way he took advice from and through you. Still he had this independent responsibility which devolves upon the Chief Executive to defend the nation in the way he thinks best. Each time he regularized one of his actions though, events forced him into yet another action that might result in impeachment.”

  The state of Roosevelt’s mind was masked by his jaunty public image. The real turmoil in the man was seen by Stephenson in moments when the President aired his frustration. It had happened earlier that year during the uproar over military aid to Britain. Lend-Lease gave the President the power to extend aid to any country whose fate he felt was vital to American defense. His enemies called him a would-be dictator for assuming such power. Critics like Robert Hutchins declared that “we are about to commit national suicide,” because of this new surrender of democratic rights in the name of national security. When the Lend-Lease bill finally passed into law in March 1941, the President indulged in an outburst that stunned his aides. “He said he was going to get tough,” Stephenson recalled later. “So many lies had got around, so many attempts had been made to scare the people that the main issues got confused. He couldn’t answer the lies until the bill was passed. Now he was going to dish out some medicine. He dictated for more than an hour a scathing and vindictive reply to the vicious attacks of senators, commentators, and propagandists. His staff were tremendously distressed. What they didn’t realize was that the President had to get the poison out of his system. He never gave the speech.”

  Operation BARBAROSSA was preceded by a Nazi deception plan whose import was not understood until later. Hitler had “Guidelines for the Deception of the Enemy” distributed by hand—fifteen numbered copies labeled MATTER FOR CHIEFS!, the most highly secret category. The contents escaped Bletchley Park. The full picture was assembled after a BSC analysis of indirect references to the original order.

  Hitler’s deception plan confirmed the view that the policeman’s straightforward approach to counterespionage was not good enough. This was bad luck for Hoover and the FBI, but a brief glance at the “Guidelines for Deception” revealed the sophisticated and ingenious techniques by which Hitler and his followers had tricked even the Soviet Union. False rumors, “disinformation” released through known Anglo-American intelligence and diplomatic channels, downright lies, and misleading military deployments took their place in a meticulous program to mislead and demoralize the target. A primary aim was to convince Stalin that a German attack would be preceded by an ultimatum, hence the Russian leader’s refusal to heed Anglo-American warnings.

  If Nazi deception had worked so well against the Russian colossus, what chance had the United States? The USSR was steeped in intrigue and armored against foreign propaganda. The U.S. believed in free speech and opened its windows to all political winds. The USSR was sealed tight against false alarms from abroad, and yet Hitler had penetrated the Kremlin with his lies. The U.S. still allowed Axis embassies to function freely and German propaganda agencies to spread Nazi versions of events. Big American corporations were interlocked with Axis commercial enterprise. There seemed no end to the opportunities for Nazi infiltration.

  The British had learned to make use of these German channels instead of arresting the agents of propaganda and espionage. Wrong information was fed back to Berlin. Roosevelt saw that counterespionage could be handled as an offensive weapon. The FBI’s chief was stubborn, though, in resisting the use of double agents. J. Edgar Hoover now made an error that, according to Hoover’s enemies, led to the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor.

  TRICYCLE, one of the double agents supposedly under British control, arrived in Stephenson’s New York office fresh from talking with his German spy masters about Pearl Harbor six months before the Japanese struck there. Hoover refused to believe his extraordinary story. When Commander Montagu later spoke of the “ghastly period” when the FBI became obstructive, he was still sick with dismay over TRICYCLE’s inability to get through to Hoover the significance of his Pearl Harbor reports.

  The incident is significant for another reason. It offers an important lesson to those who would revise history long after the event. At any given time, the intelligence signals foreshadowing a move by the enemy are part of the general uproar of information, some true, but much of it possibly false, including deception material deliberately planted by the enemy or (even more effectively) by the enemy’s secret friends. In hindsight, it may seem that the true warnings should have stood out like beacons. A distant observer, looking back, is unaware of all the other distractions, some of them contradictory, that at the time seemed equally important. The lesson applies as much to the varied evaluations of ULTRA as it does to the particular case of Pearl Harbor.

  * Montagu became Judge Advocate of the British Fleet, but postwar fame came to him as the author of a scheme to float a corpse into German hands complete with bogus plans for the invasion of Sardinia—a cover for the planned and eventual invasion of Sicily—told in The Man Who Never Was.

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  TRICYCLE was the British code name for a Yugoslav patriot named Dusko Popov, pronounced Popoff (which resulted in his being given the password Scoot!). Among his many peculiarities that offended J. Edgar Hoover was the role he played of double agent. Though first recruited by German intelligence, he volunteered to report to the British Secret Intelligence Service and to feed the Germans “controlled” information—apparently valuable but approved first by SIS. In this way, he could extract information from the Germans, usually by a careful study of the questions for which they required answers.

  In June 1941, having thrilled his German masters with his seemingly brilliant exploits in England, he was told to move to the United States. On the way, he held meetings in Lisbon with his German handlers. They told him the Japanese were studying a method of using carrier-borne torpedo bombers against Pearl Harbor, something along the lines of a British operation against the Italian fleet a few months earlier. Using a new kind of aerial torpedo, the British had sunk half the enemy fleet in the shallow waters of Taranto in southern Italy. The German Air Attaché in Tokyo, Baron Gronau, had flown to Taranto specifically to carry out research on the whole operation. The Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matusoka, had gone to Berlin with a team of specialists to secure details. TRICYCLE was told all this and then given a questionnaire that focused on Pearl Harbor defenses.

  He dutifully reported the German view that Japanese naval units for the first time seemed to think they could knock out a major portion of the American Pacific Fleet by using the tactics employed by the British Fleet Air Arm at Taranto—especially because the British had improvised aerial torpedoes for shallow water and launched them in the face of seemingly impenetrable def
enses, anticipating the very conditions at Pearl Harbor. Stephenson, as an aviator, was outraged by the evidence of how Britain starved its Navy pilots of modern warplanes; their torpedoes were launched from obsolescent Swordfish biplanes. He redoubled his campaign to secure aircraft from the U.S. Navy, which had wisely preserved its own air service during the lean years. Many British naval fliers owed their survival to the subsequent adoption of U.S. carrier equipment, then far in advance of British designs. The swift American response to these British naval needs meant the transfer of weapons from the Pacific, where Japan’s formidable carrier forces outmatched the Allies’. Perhaps this was a major result of Taranto. The clues it gave to the coming disaster of Pearl Harbor were lost in the daily accumulation of more immediate alarms.

  Since TRICYCLE was now on American soil, he must be handed over to the FBI and Hoover, who would be quick to protest if he thought information was being withheld. But TRICYCLE’s personality clashed violently with Hoover’s; even his code name was an affront. “It arose from his sexual athleticism,” Hoover later wrote caustically. “He had a liking for bedding two girls at one time.” One of his mistresses, according to Hoover, left her home and work to be with him whenever possible. “He was a Balkan playboy with orders to investigate our atomic energy project and report monthly on our aid to Britain.”