War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  Bagnold had come up with the plan. In Khartoum he had heard that the governor of Chad, Felix Eboué, was the rare French colonial official who had not yet come out for Vichy. Bagnold had decided it was time for a rogue diplomatic mission. He flew half the breadth of Africa to Fort Lamy, the capital of Chad, where he collapsed on the runway, apparently from a relapse of malaria. He woke in a bedroom in Eboué’s residence. A few hours later, Eboué entered the room with a lieutenant colonel named d’Ornano. Eboué was a black man from Martinique in the Caribbean. D’Ornano, from Corsica, was a tall, pale redhead who wore the flowing cape of the camel cavalry and was deputy commander of the French garrison. The commander, who leaned toward Vichy, had refused to come. D’Ornano seized his place.

  Bagnold told them he wanted to strike Italian outposts in southwest Libya, the far corner from Egypt, but his patrols could not carry enough fuel, food, and water to operate that far from home. He wanted their help.

  “We’ve got to decide now,” d’Ornano told the governor. “This is our chance.” Eboué assented with a nod of his head. D’Ornano had a condition: he would go along, with a few men, and the patrol would fly both British and French flags. D’Ornano proceeded to write out a formal agreement with the British army, which he signed in the name of the French army of Chad.

  So d’Ornano and nine of his men were waiting for Clayton at a nowhere in the desert that according to maps drawn in Europe was on the line between Libya and Chad. Four afternoons later, trucks rolled into Murzuk, a Libyan oasis town and former way station on the caravan route to Timbuktu. One patrol hit the tiny Italian airbase, destroying three fighter-bombers and a hangar, while the other attacked the Italian fortress at the edge of town. Soldiers caught outside were shot down. The Italian commander was returning from his lunch break to the fort when a shell blew up his car. But the soldiers inside the fort started firing back. After two hours Clayton decided to retreat.

  He’d lost two men. One was d’Ornano. They were buried in the desert.

  Afterward the combined force raided three more Italian outposts. The next target on their list was Kufra oasis. The Italians were on their guard now. An Italian plane spotted Clayton’s patrol, opened fire, and wounded him. The man who’d rescued the refugees from Kufra a decade earlier was taken prisoner and shipped to Italy before he could take part in conquering the oasis.

  The Free French later finished the job at Kufra, though. The French flag and another with the Croix de Lorraine—the cross with two bars that Free France had taken as its emblem—flew over the oasis. But Bagnold became military governor—the explorer now the prince of a piece of the desert—and the LRDG had a base inside Libya from which its patrols, navigating by the stars and sun, could vanish into the desert to watch the Italians or attack them. Chad was now firmly an Allied outpost in the center of Africa, and the Free French and Bagnold’s Boys were sworn partners in desert piracy. The big war was still on the coast, but the Italian army never knew when it would be attacked elsewhere. It was like a man trying to fight a boxing match while swatting wasps away from his legs.28

  On the coast, an Australian division took Bardia less than a week into 1941. Tobruk, another eighty-five miles up the coast, fell later in the month. By now, the British held one hundred thousand Italians prisoner. “Twenty percent,” Moorehead wrote, “were found to be suffering some form of chronic dysentery,” the enemy shared by all armies. In the town, he found the streets littered with clothes, toys, and chairs, the jetsam of Italian civilians who’d fled. Flames leapt from a furniture warehouse; wine from broken vats flowed in the street. “In the bay a ship kept burning steadily. By its light the wounded were being carried down to the docks.” Moorehead’s joy at victory evaporated, leaving “an unreasoning sense of futility.”29

  Tobruk’s harbor, Bonner Fellers told the War Department, would allow the Western Desert Force to keep rolling onward into Libya. No longer would trucks from the Nile need to bring all the fuel, food, and ammunition that an army devoured. Fellers had driven those hundreds of miles from Cairo to the front himself. The Italians were losing, he reported, because they were fighting the wrong war, a war of fixed camps and roads. “The British daringly stretched the mobility of their armored units to the limit,” he wrote. “The Italians avoided the desert… while [the British] found security in the desert and lived therein.”30

  The coastline of Cyrenaica, the eastern province of Libya, was shaped like a camel’s hump. Derna, the next harbor after Tobruk, was near the top and marked the beginning of a range of coastal hills known simply as Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains, where real rain fell, trees grew, and fields could be farmed. At the far end of the mountains, on the other side of the hump, lay Benghazi, the largest town in the region.

  After losing Tobruk, Graziani’s broken forces fled, abandoning Derna and then Benghazi. Their only goal was to reach Tripolitania, the western province of Libya. They stuck to the long curve of the coastal road. One of O’Connor’s divisions, Australians, chased the Italians. As if to demonstrate Fellers’s thesis, O’Connor sent his other division nearly in a straight line across the desert south of the Green Mountains. There was no road. There were no maps to guide the truck and tank drivers for much of the journey. They made it. The Italians were “caught on February 7 between the Australian column… and the British armored division astride Benghazi-Tripoli road,” Fellers radioed Washington. Except for three hundred trucks that British planes spotted heading west, “it is doubtful that any Italian forces escaped.”31

  The Italian burghers of Benghazi did make it down the road. The town of sixty-six thousand had been one-third Italian. Most fled, including the wealthy, the Fascist officials, and the police. The Italian mayor stayed to surrender. The British found the Muslim majority mostly friendly, especially members of the Senussi order. Many of Benghazi’s thirty-three hundred Jews greeted the British as their liberators and the Jewish soldiers from Palestine in British uniforms as a miracle.32 In the Jewish quarter, one soldier from Palestine wrote home, “A crowd surrounded me… they actually tried to kiss my hand.” An old man touched him and recited, “Blessed be He who shares his glory with flesh and blood,” the blessing dictated by tradition for a Jewish king.33

  “Today I met Bonner Fellers, the U.S. military attaché here—an original and delightful person who seems to say exactly what he thinks to everyone regardless of nationality or rank,” Hermione Ranfurly wrote in her diary in Cairo. “He has just returned from the desert and spoke with… admiration of how our attack was kept secret. ‘General Wavell told me they were going to do manoeuvres so up I went as an observer, and God dammit—it was the works.’”34 She seemed to like a man who would curse to a countess. As for Fellers, after twenty-two years in the US Army, he was at last seeing battle.

  Far to the south, a British force had invaded Ethiopia. Having gone to war with Britain to complete his African empire, Mussolini was losing the empire entirely. In Libya, “at present there is no chance of a counter-attack by the Italians. Between Tripoli and Benghazi there are no prepared [Italian] defenses. The Arabs are definitely hostile toward the Italians and the road is good,” Fellers radioed home. “It is my opinion that an immediate pursuit will be undertaken by the British.”35

  4

  HALF-SHARED SECRETS

  Winter–Spring 1941. Bletchley Park–Tobruk–Crete–Cairo.

  “NOW WE’RE GETTING places,” Bonner Fellers told Countess Ranfurly. It was March 11, and he’d phoned to tell her that President Roosevelt had just signed the Lend-Lease Act on the same day that the US Congress passed it. The law allowed the president to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” arms to “any country whose defense the president deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Put differently, the law meant that Roosevelt could now give Britain whatever it needed to keep fighting.1

  Roosevelt had announced the Lend-Lease idea at a press conference in December 1940, and followed up with the national r
adio broadcast in which he pledged that America would be “the arsenal of democracy.” He’d just been elected to a third term, and he’d received a letter from Churchill explaining that Britain was running out of money to pay for American arms. Roosevelt did not want to go to war; he wanted Britain to win, and for that it needed American guns, tanks, bullets, airplanes, trucks, ships, shells, and more.2

  Charles Lindbergh, the spokesman of isolationism, had testified in Congress, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, against Lend-Lease.

  “Which side do you want to win?” he was asked.

  “Neither,” Lindbergh answered.3

  Lindbergh had been one of the last people Fellers met before sailing for Spain the summer before. Now Fellers had been granted rare access to Britain’s secrets and watched its battles. He knew which side he wanted to win.

  DEEPER SECRETS WERE being shared than Fellers knew about. One was contained in a two-hundred-pound box, part of the luggage of four American junior officers who boarded the British battleship King George V at Annapolis, Maryland, at the end of January 1941. Two were from the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service: Lieutenant Leo Rosen and Abe Sinkov, recently transformed from civilian to captain. (In his dress uniform, Sinkov looked like an intellectual masquerading as an officer; his rimless glasses emphasized his down-turned eyebrows and the distant, knowing gaze in his close-set eyes.) Sinkov was a late addition. Colonel William Friedman was supposed to go, but he was still in Walter Reed Hospital, recovering from his post-Purple breakdown.4 The other two, Prescott Currier and Robert Weeks, were from OP-20-G, the navy’s rival parallel organization. The pairs met each other for the first time at the dock. The army and navy codebreaking agencies treated each other at times practically as hostile powers.5

  (The King George V had just brought Lord Halifax to America to become Britain’s new ambassador.6 Churchill preferred to have the former appeasement advocate in Washington rather than serving as foreign secretary in London—especially as the prime minister anyway handled the core of British-US relations directly with Roosevelt.)

  The seed of the American codebreakers’ visit was planted the summer before, with an offer through the British embassy in Washington to share military information. As with Anthony Eden’s openness to Fellers, the point was to woo the United States into a closer alliance. Then something embarrassing happened: the Americans took the wooing all too seriously. The US Army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, General Sherman Miles, hoped that gaining British knowledge of Axis codes and ciphers would make it possible to uncover plans for attacking the Panama Canal or Latin American countries, and to find German and Italian spies in America.7 The number two man at the British embassy in Washington sent a cable home in October. “The proposal was made that full exchange should now take place… concerning crypto-graphic machines, codes and cyphers of Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and possibly even other countries,” he said.8

  The request bounced through opulent London offices to the desk of Stewart Menzies, head of MI6 and therefore also responsible for the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, the new name of the Government Code and Cypher School. He carefully offered a “pretty free interchange of cryptographic information,” signing his name, as MI6 tradition dictated, “C,” in green ink.

  A cable came back from Washington. Both the War and Navy departments had noticed the words “pretty free.” This didn’t sound like, say, “completely free.” They were unhappy.9

  Menzies wrote a note that indicated squirming. “A full interchange on Germany and Italy could not be entertained,” he wrote, meaning that the Americans must not be told about breaking Enigma. Americans were not good at keeping secrets. But, he added, expressing “any reservations will annoy the United States authorities.” Menzies called GCHQ director Alastair Denniston to consult and then wrote a new memo, to Churchill. Tell the Americans yes, Menzies suggested, but make a “mental reservation” not to tell them about German Enigma. “That work is conducted in separate buildings,” he said, which American visitors wouldn’t be shown.

  Churchill sent a question back, in his barbed-wire handwriting and his usual red ink: “What will they think if they find we have been reading their stuff?”

  Apparently Menzies reassured him that GCHQ’s work on American codes could also be kept from the visitors.10

  On an afternoon in early February 1941, the four American officers disembarked at the Royal Navy base at Sheerness, at the mouth of the Thames. Two staff cars were waiting for them, along with a truck for their crates. They reached Bletchley Park at night. The mansion, with its blackout curtains drawn, was a dark shadow in a darker countryside. Inside, Denniston stood waiting to greet them in his office, with Tiltman towering over him, and with two other top staffers and a cask of sherry. From there, they were taken to the country house of the chairman of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, where a butler, three maids, and a cook would make them at home for the next ten weeks. They often lunched at Tiltman’s home near Bletchley Park, where Tiltman’s wife served off-the-ration-card chicken and lobster. The extravagant hospitality, perhaps, was designed to show goodwill while diverting their interest from some of the huts on the Bletchley Park lawn.11

  But then there was that big crate, sent as a dowry by Friedman’s Signal Intelligence Service.12 It contained a fully operative replica of Japan’s Purple cipher machine. The Americans set it up and showed how it worked. Before being given anything, they’d offered up the greatest success of American cryptography.

  John Tiltman was dumbstruck by the “magnificent gesture.” He’d worked on Japan’s codes and ciphers for years, since he’d taught himself Japanese. Purple had eluded him. The obvious quid pro quo was to tell the Americans about the Enigma work. Denniston wouldn’t hear of it, so Tiltman went up the ladder to Menzies, who in turn went to Churchill with a compromise: show the US officers the machines used to decipher Enigma but not deciphered messages. “As proposed,” Churchill scribbled in assent.13

  Margaret Storey was working in Hut 6 that winter.14 A standard task for young multilingual women was operating an improvised version of an Enigma machine. The device tested whether a setting suggested by the bombes was, in fact, the one in which a message had been enciphered. If it was correct, deciphering could begin. It was a repetitive, draining task, performed for many hours, assembly-line work of the mind, in shifts that switched from day to evening to the midnight-to-dawn run.15 If Storey looked up from her work one day, she might have spotted two or four visitors in civilian dress, receiving quiet explanations from someone senior. If she had asked who they were, she would have been told they were Canadians. But in Hut 6—a small, separate universe of thick cigarette smoke and nicotine-stained ceilings, of linoleum floors and weak British sunlight made weaker by the blackout curtains around the windows and the brick blast walls around the building—you did not ask questions or talk to anyone about your work. The visitors would not have been taking notes; the deal worked out by Tiltman required them to commit what they learned to memory, not paper, and to reveal the Enigma secrets only to Friedman and the head of OP-20-G.16

  The officers’ visit had already produced two results: Tiltman was settling into the role of liaison with his US counterparts. Indeed, a lifelong friendship had begun between Tiltman and “Abe and Prescott”—the army’s Sinkov and the navy’s Currier.17 And reluctantly, GCHQ was sharing more than it had planned.

  But not everything.

  TILTMAN HAD OTHER new friends. By early spring, perhaps in time to meet the American visitors over lunch, Russell Dudley-Smith and his new wife, Joan, rented the ground floor of the Tiltman family’s two-story house. Dudley-Smith was a thin man, nearly six feet tall, with a narrow face that made his Royal Navy officer’s cap and his horn-rimmed glasses look much too large. When he left in the morning for the short walk to work at Bletchley Park, Tiltman’s teenage daughter would remember, Dudley-Smith’s uniform “always looked like an unmade bed.”18

  Dudle
y-Smith had been two in 1914 when his father died. His mother provided for him and his sister—so family lore would say—by moving from one relative’s house to another every six months. Despite the wanderings, he got top marks in school. He enrolled at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, where classes were given at night. It allowed him to work in the day as a lab assistant at the Royal Arsenal’s research department in Woolwich in the southeast of London. In a poem, he called Woolwich “a town of guns and slime… and trams and touts and pallid whores.” His poems were typed, or written in a handwriting so precise it could have been a printer’s fancy font.

  The mix of wanderlust and disgust with London that show up in his poetry may explain why he left the university, without graduating, for the Royal Navy. His thick glasses disqualified him for a combat role. His mathematic abilities qualified him to become a naval paymaster, a ship’s accountant. The job was poor fare for a hungry mind. He read The News from Tartary, adventurer Peter Fleming’s account of his journey from Peking to Kashmir, and carefully copied out the itinerary. He taught himself Persian, arranged to get newspapers in that language, and joined the Royal Central Asian Society. He wrote a taxonomy of personality traits. He wrote a study of the causes of suicide.

  In the first months of the war, he was serving aboard the HMS Resolution, flagship of a squadron in the North Atlantic. He wasn’t allowed on deck (so family memory would say) lest the wind rip off his glasses. Some messages encoded in the Royal Navy’s flagship code caught his bored eye.

  When it came to his intellectual ability, he could overcome his shyness. He managed to talk to the admiral. I don’t think our codes are safe, Paymaster Lieutenant Dudley-Smith said. Could he try decoding them? The admiral told him to try. In three weeks he’d broken them.

  Early in 1940, the Resolution put in for repairs. Dudley-Smith came down with German measles and was given medical leave. At home, he received a letter saying that he was “wanted for a cryptographic appointment as he has made this one of his interests.” He found himself at Mansfield College, Oxford, where navy and GC&CS experts designed British codes. The man in charge was Commander Edward Travis, who was also the deputy director of Bletchley Park.