In Stalin’s mind, it seems, even the movements of the clouds in the sky hinted at conspiracies against him. The attempts afterward to decipher Stalin’s response to Churchill’s warning—if, that is, Vyshinsky dared to give it to him—and to similar warnings would be endless. The most convincing reading is that he saw all of the intelligence as signs of a plot to draw him into war with Germany.63
There was such a plot. It was Hitler’s. He had never made a secret of his desire to colonize the Slavic lands to Germany’s east. Along with his war against the Jews, this was basic to his dark dream.64
5
THE LADY WHO SPIED ON SPIES
Summer–Autumn 1941. Cairo–Ukraine–Bletchley Park–Derna.
“THE GERMANS BELIEVE it will all be over in eight weeks,” Galeazzo Ciano scribbled in his diary. There were more and more clues that it would start soon, he wrote.
The German envoy in Rome, Otto von Bismarck—grandson of his namesake, the first chancellor of united Germany—woke Ciano at 3 a.m. the next morning with a letter from Hitler to Mussolini, telling him that Germany was invading the Soviet Union. It was June 22, 1941. Operation Barbarossa had begun.
Bismarck told him that “German military circles” expected to take five million prisoners, Ciano wrote. Then Ciano corrected himself: “five million slaves” were the words that Otto had used.1
ONE NIGHT IN Cairo, Hermione Ranfurly would go to a dinner party that she did not want to attend, where everyone had been invited “for their name” and everyone had “a title or a million,” where dinner had not been served by 10 p.m. because no one could eat until King Farouk did, and Farouk—thought Ranfurly—would not be hungry because he ate six pounds of chocolate a day. She found herself with the king, who began “a clumsy sort of flirting.” She asked him why he never brought his beautiful queen to parties. “It would be fun,” she said.
“Yes, for other people,” he said, and let loose with a bellowing laugh.
He called the countess “Ramsbottom” and ignored her deliberate rudeness in response. She managed to get away from him. Not everyone did. Farouk was the best-known philanderer in his kingdom.2
In the spring and summer of 1941, though, Farouk was seeking a much more serious liaison. His go-between was his father-in-law, Youssef Zulficar, who was also his envoy to Iran. Zulficar belonged to the old Turkish aristocracy of Egypt. A photo from the time of his daughter’s wedding to Farouk shows a pale-haired, thin-lipped, unsmiling man with a sharp chin and hooded eyes. In April, as Rommel overran Cyrenaica and appeared poised for a drive into Egypt, Zulficar asked for an urgent meeting with Erwin Ettel, the German ambassador in Tehran. Farouk, Zulficar said, had ordered him to ask for the meeting. The king had told him to express his “strong admiration for the Führer.” Farouk expected the arrival of German troops “as liberators from the unbearably brutal English yoke,” Zulficar said.
Ettel, an SS brigadier general, noted approvingly in a cable to Berlin that Zulficar was “strikingly Nordic in appearance.”3
From Berlin came a reply in Hitler’s name. Germany, it promised, wanted to create “a new order of things” that included the “independence of Egypt and the entire Arab world.” Lest Farouk worry about Italy, Hitler assured him, this was also the Duce’s view.4
So far, these were sweet nothings. At the end of June, Farouk took the relationship much further. Zulficar met again with Ettel, bearing information from the king: The British general staff was preparing to invade Iran. Preparations would take about two months, the conquest itself three weeks. By sharing this, Farouk’s father-in-law stressed, the king meant to demonstrate his “candor and faith toward Germany.”5 Hitler did nothing with this information. His armies were busy along the eighteen-hundred-mile Soviet front.
Two months later, the invasion of Iran began. In three weeks, British and Soviet troops were in Tehran, the shah had abdicated and been replaced with his twenty-two-year-old son, and the new allies held a route by which American Lend-Lease aid could be shipped from Persian Gulf ports to the Red Army.
Farouk’s tip had not been entirely accurate. Most importantly, it didn’t include the Soviet forces that would come from the north. Ettel’s letter to Berlin contains no clues as to how Farouk learned of the plan. What appears certain is that, as of June 1941, strategic information from the highest rank of the British command in Cairo reached the palace and that Farouk passed it on as proof of his support for Germany.
BEFORE SHE LEFT the office of the Special Operations Executive each evening and locked up, Ranfurly slipped the day’s most revealing new documents into her bra. Around the corner, at the apartment of SOE officer Bill Stirling, she typed copies for him to deliver to the agreed contact. Then she went home. In the morning, she stuffed the originals back into her bra, opened the office, and returned them.
The agreed contact was General Arthur Smith, Wavell’s chief of staff.
(Stirling shared the apartment with another disgruntled SOE man, Peter Fleming, the author and adventurer, whose younger brother, Ian, would yet make a name for himself. Stirling and Fleming had little respect for the flat’s Egyptian owners and were apparently inebriated often. Once they brought a donkey up three flights into the flat. Another time, they held revolver practice in the drawing room, perforating the wall and quite nearly the Sudanese servant.)
Back when she’d started at the SOE, she loved the job, and not just because it kept her in Cairo and paid very nicely. Most of the staff were known by numbers rather than names. They reported in from the Balkans, Persia, Somaliland, and Palestine. “We sent little boats up the Danube to lay mines; we sent gentlemen forth with wirelesses in suitcases and instructions to blow up certain bridges,” she wrote. The office had a room full of guns and ammunition and a safe full of gold bars.
Then she started seeing other things. The gold, it seemed to her, was “spent more on women than on war.” Security was so bad that a house cleaner skillful with a straight pin could have stolen plans. Ranfurly was “astonished to find my office giving… extra aid to the Jewish Agency, the Zionist headquarters in Jerusalem.” Stirling told her the SOE was smuggling illegal Jewish immigrants into Palestine. “The Arab world under the statesmanship of King Ibn Saud had maintained peace” and allowed Britain to use the ports of Aden, Suez, and Haifa, she believed, but the SOE was endangering this.
Her employers were “double-crossing everyone except their mistresses,” she concluded.
One night at the Wavells’ home, the general inquired about her work. She told him. After that, Arthur Smith asked her and Stirling for evidence of what was happening in the maverick agency. Smith wanted to show it to the British cabinet’s representative, Oliver Lyttelton, who was coming to Cairo to coordinate the war effort. Thus commenced Ranfurly’s career “spying on a spy organization.” It ended in late June, when she got a letter at the office from Smith saying she could accept an offer to become assistant private secretary to Harold MacMichael, the high commissioner of Palestine, “as soon you have finished your work for me in the SOE office.” She found it on her desk, the envelope opened, and she stormed into the office of George Pollock, the director, and quit before she could be fired.6
An SOE file from later that summer on the troubles in the Cairo office reads like several men with very proper vocabularies shouting accusations at each other in a small room. The nature of the SOE’s work attracted daring people who thought little of rules and who were better at blowing things up than keeping records. Whatever paper trail did exist was mostly burned later, and the remaining scraps redacted. So it is hard to know how much money was legitimately spent on bribes, false papers, boats, and bombs and how much was spent on liquor, silk stockings, and “cabaret girls.” A couple of fantastical schemes for blocking ship traffic on the Danube came to nothing. The SOE did not bring Jews illegally to Palestine. But operatives of the Jewish Agency’s secret organization for bringing Jews from Europe, the Mossad Le’aliyah Bet, once did so with a ship that it had already
sold to the SOE. The Jewish organization’s emissaries in Istanbul, it turned out, had only learned of the sale after they’d loaded the ship with refugees in Romania. That incident caused the one serious crisis between the Special Operations Executive and Palestinian Jews.7
King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud lacked the influence that Ranfurly attributed to him, and he depended on a British subsidy to keep his impoverished desert realm solvent.8 But the British Empire’s earlier support for a Jewish home in Palestine was indeed one cause of Arab rancor, and perhaps the easiest one for the empire’s generals and diplomats to talk about. In London and Cairo, officials worried that alliances with the Zionists now would cost Britain dearly later, especially after the war. Ranfurly was mistaken in details, but it appears that she accurately wrote the anxiety.
SOE operatives lived inside other worries: not what governments might do later, but which local people could be trusted right now. “Our organization in the Balkans and the Middle East has… been receiving a very substantial measure of assistance from certain representatives in Palestine and elsewhere in the Near East of the Jewish Agency for Palestine,” an SOE memo from early 1941 said. What the agency could “achieve in the Middle East will depend to a large extent on the continuance of good relations with these Jews.”9
Wavell ordered the SOE to stop training Jewish saboteurs, an order that George Pollock, Ranfurly’s boss, treated with “neglect.” But in the bad days of May, when Wavell was preparing to invade Vichy-ruled Lebanon and Syria and needed guides to lead Australian units into Lebanon, he turned to the SOE to recruit Palestinian Jews.10
The leaders of the Haganah, the underground Zionist militia, had just decided to create their own small, full-time military group, the “strike force,” or Palmah. The first few dozen men became the SOE’s scouts. They were given all of a week to slip into southern Lebanon and map roads, bridges, and French positions and, just before the operation began, to cut telephone lines.
In a village called Iskanderoun on the Lebanese coast, on the first morning of the operation, six Australians and four Palestinian Jews managed to take a French machine-gun position, but came under fire from a nearby orchard. “I aimed the French machine gun at them… and looked through a telescope to see exactly where they were,” the leader of the Jewish group reported afterward. “At that moment a bullet hit my hand and my eye and put me out of action.”11 He lived, but had to wear a patch over the shattered eye socket the rest of his life.
His name was Moshe Dayan. Another of the Jewish bands was led by Dayan’s rival, Yigal Allon, and included Allon’s friend, nineteen-year-old Yitzhak Rabin.
Damascus fell on June 21, 1941, Beirut on July 10. The Vichy forces surrendered the next day.12 In a letter from Pollock to Wavell on the Syria operation, the role of the Jewish scouts accounts for four brief paragraphs. In the British story of war in the Middle East, this is less than a footnote.13 In Zionist history, it became a legend: the first action of the Jewish army-to-be, led by the original warriors. Both accounts are accurate.
Ranfurly moved to Jerusalem to work for the high commissioner. Pollock was sent home that summer. Terence Maxwell, his replacement, was soon working with “the Friends,” as the Zionists were called in the SOE.
THE GERMAN POLICE unit reported by radio that it had executed 1,153 Jewish “plunderers” near Slonim, a town in Belorussia.
The message was dated July 18, 1941, and came from a militarized wing of the police that worked with the SS. The German police did not have Enigma machines. They used a cipher method known as transposition: rearranging the letters of the original text, according to a pattern that shifted daily. At Bletchley Park, John Tiltman headed a section that had been breaking the police cipher since the start of the war. The main problem was intercepting messages, which were hard to pick up in Britain. This one was intercepted.
Others followed. In early August, an SS brigade radioed that it had killed 3,274 partisans and “Jewish Bolshevists.” On August 7, it presented its total since the start of Barbarossa: 7,819 people executed. The same day a summary for the entire central sector of the front said the police had shot thirty thousand people, most of them Jews, in that time. The SS reports sometimes came in the police cipher, sometimes in an SS key of Enigma that Hut 6 labeled Orange and broke irregularly.14
The reports, with their cold, precise numbers, kept coming. “The Commanding Officer of Police for South Russia says… Police Regiment South Battalion shot 367 Jews,” said one message, which was included in the daily packet for Churchill. The number is circled in red, the color ink that Churchill used.15
The numbers did not tell the young translators in their huts on the lawn in the English countryside names or ages. They did not portray faces, or tell how these human beings had been rounded up, or whether they had known what would happen to them. Still, the messages indicated something new was happening: just behind the advancing German divisions, the SS and the police were slaughtering Jews, methodically, keeping count to show they were doing their job. Since many messages were not intercepted, or not deciphered, the statistics indicated part of an unknown whole.
Churchill gave a radio speech on August 24.16 He had just returned from a secret journey across the Atlantic in a battleship, risking attack by German U-boats, to meet Franklin Roosevelt in person off the coast of Newfoundland. Now he could talk about the meeting, though he did not reveal the location, or that he had asked Roosevelt again, repeatedly, to declare war, or that the president had said the time was not yet ripe.17 Instead Churchill said in his speech that if the negotiations between America and Japan broke down, “we shall, of course, range ourselves unhesitatingly at the side of the United States.” Then he talked about Hitler’s attack on Russia. “As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil… We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”18
In a GCHQ dossier on breaches of security, someone wrote down “30,000 Jews killed.” Churchill hadn’t actually mentioned that the Nazi machinery of murder was targeting Jews, but he had referred to the police as perpetrators. Using information from intercepts to stir public opinion was risky. Three weeks later the German police switched to a different method of transposition, in which the letters were rearranged twice. Tiltman’s codebreakers, however, had an even easier time with the new cipher method, and the numbers kept coming. Nothing more was said publicly.19
IN BERLIN, AT the Reich Security Main Office—the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA—Walther Rauff did not have to worry about codebreaking or interception. Rauff, the once disgraced navy officer become SS bureaucrat, received all of the reports from the field.
The RSHA, under Reinhard Heydrich, was the main office of Nazi terror. The SS, the Gestapo, and the police all came under its roof. It directed the Einsatzgruppen, the Special Operations Units carrying out the slaughter in the east. Rauff headed the RSHA’s technical arm. He was responsible for transportation, weapons, radio communication—all the physical machinery that served the murderers.
In September 1941, Heydrich assigned him to work on a new way to kill large numbers of Jews. The business of shooting people was wearing down the SS and police troops. Heydrich favored using trucks that would transport and kill at the same time, using the exhaust from the engine.
Rauff’s job was to complete the most lethal, efficient design possible and produce the machines. He worked diligently. He contracted with a tram company to build the chambers to mount on truck chassis. By November, he had a prototype. In the first test, in Berlin, it efficiently extinguished the lives of thirty Soviet prisoners of war. He ordered more and sent them out to the Einsatzgruppen. He’d taken a further step in his career, from bureaucrat to engineer of death. From then on, “his signature, his initials or his name” would appear “on almost every piece of paper” regarding the mobile gas chambers. A
s many as half a million people would be murdered in them.20
IN TOBRUK, THE Australians lived in trenches. There were twenty-five thousand of them. Royal Navy destroyers brought in supplies at night, slipping into the harbor through a pathway between sunken ships. The town was a “maze of broken tottering buildings, though they gleamed white and clear in the sun,” Alan Moorehead wrote. Rommel could not risk advancing as long as the British might attack behind his front line. Tobruk was like the jagged butt of a broken bottle, poised an inch from his back.
Beyond the Tobruk perimeter, the war had wandered off someplace else that summer. “Possibly because of the Russian campaign, U-boats and German raiders were less active,” Moorehead suggested, so more convoys were arriving safely. The British had driven the Italians out of Ethiopia, and Vichy out of Beirut and Damascus.
In Egypt, the troops ate well, better than people in England living on rations—and much better than the vast majority of Egyptians. In Monufia province, north of Cairo, the half million fellaheen (peasants) were living on less than one piaster a day each, one-hundredth of an Egyptian pound and the equivalent of four US cents. So the US commercial attaché wrote. The war at sea had cut the supply of fertilizer from Chile for Egypt’s fields; the spring wheat harvest had fallen one-sixth short of the average. Egyptian bakers were ordered to mix rice or corn flour into their dough. Prime Minister Hussein Sirry warned British ambassador Miles Lampson that the bread shortage was “liable to give rise to disturbances.”21 People hoarded kerosene and sugar.
Soldiers did not see this. They did not wander into villages or understand anger spoken in Arabic. When they got leave in Cairo, Moorehead wrote, they “luxuriated in hot baths and cold beer.” Even when they recalled or looked forward to battles, they could think of the desert war as “the most dangerous game on earth… No civilian populations were being destroyed… If Benghazi fell, then it was just a manoeuvre of war.” Writing this, Moorehead forgot that civilians had lived in Benghazi, and the futility he’d felt watching the fires in Tobruk the first day Wavell’s men got there.22
War of Shadows Page 21
