That night Rommel reported that his forces had pushed forward against “fanatical resistance.” Everywhere in the Eighth Army, war correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote, soldiers were “full of glowing pride” in the French. The “little tricolor”—the French flag—still aloft at Bir Hakeim was erasing “all the bitter accusations against the French soldier after the fall of France,” Moorehead said, though he knew most of the soldiers around that flag were not French.4
“The value of [Bir Hakeim]… though still great, is less than when battle started,” Auchinleck decided at General Headquarters Middle East in Cairo. His reasons for this judgment are unclear, but Ritchie gave General Koenig permission to pull out.
Rommel’s morning report on June 11 said that overnight the Free French had “attempted… to break out to the southwest. The attempt was almost completely defeated.” Rommel was mistaken. Koenig had found the gap in the German siege line. In a car driven by Susan Travers, he led most of his surviving men out. Travers would eventually receive the Croix de Guerre, the War Cross, with a citation for her “bravery in the face of several barrages of intense artillery fire, numerous bullet strikes of her vehicle and pitch blackness.” At Bir Hakeim, only the wounded stayed behind. Germans records show that the prisoners included forty-four nationalities.5
Later that day, a British wireless operator managed to take down a few words of a German message. Its evaluation of the strategic importance of the battle differed ominously from Auchinleck’s.
At 8 a.m., it said, Bir Hakeim, “the southern bastion of the fortress of Tobruk,” had fallen.6
“A GOOD SOURCE” reported that he had visited the headquarters of the British Thirteenth and Thirtieth Corps and the Fourth Armored Brigade. So said the deciphered text that Menzies handed Winston Churchill on June 10.
“Battle morale of officers and men excellent,” the source had conveyed a month earlier, on May 8, and also, “Training inferior according to American ideas.”
That reframed everything. The source had measured British training by “American ideas.” It fit together with a previous clue: German intelligence having the full text of the complaint from Washington about RAF technicians failing at upkeep of American-made warplanes.
As usual, Menzies had clipped a narrow slip of paper to the front of the “special intelligence” material, with a one-sentence typed summary. This time, under the typed words, the MI6 chief added a handwritten note in green ink.
“Prime Minister,” it said, “I am satisfied that the American cyphers in Cairo are compromised. I am taking action.”7
Menzies no longer suggested that the Germans had a spy in Washington, or in Egypt. Rather, he said, they were reading a code used between the two places. This evaluation came from Bletchley Park, where the cipher security officer was Russell Dudley-Smith and the research specialist on enemy intelligence was Margaret Storey.8
The evaluation would be asserted, and cast again into doubt, on the top-secret telegraph channel between Washington and Bletchley Park.
Sometime that night, while Koenig and his soldiers were breaking out of Bir Hakeim, John Tiltman wired William Friedman at the Signal Intelligence Service. There was a leak in communications between Cairo and Washington, he said.9
“What system is being read?” Friedman replied. This meant: What kind of code or cipher was used for the leaked messages? Friedman listed the methods used by Americans in Cairo. The military mission—General Maxwell’s supply operation—used a “secret cipher machine.” The military attaché used an enciphered code. The US Navy used a device known as a strip cipher; the State Department’s people also used a strip cipher, along with “several codes, all enciphered.”
“Must have some definite information before action can be taken,” Friedman wrote, and then added another question: “With whom [on the] British staff should our army authority in Cairo confer? Most urgent reply requested.”10
Friedman had made a faux pas, or an accusation. The note implied that Tiltman also knew how the words were encrypted. This was something that you would know from intercepting the original, encoded American message. Friedman’s cable thereby hinted that the British themselves were intercepting American traffic and had broken their ally’s code or cipher.
The suggestion from Washington was most undiplomatic. Tiltman ignored it.
Instead, Tiltman referred to content. His answer was cosigned by Solomon Kullback, one of Friedman’s original protégés, still a senior American codebreaker, who was visiting Bletchley Park. “Leakage includes a particular message of April 16th… for Maxwell,” they wrote, pointing to the certain evidence of the complaint about RAF negligence. “[We] have seen the German messages as well as the original American message.” They matched.
British authorities, they said, “beg no communication with Cairo.” This meant: No, you must not ask your army people there to talk to ours. If your men clumsily radio home, the eavesdropping Germans will hear—and may figure out that we are listening to them. If anything was more dangerous than the leak itself, it was a leak about an investigation.11 It could endanger everything Bletchley Park had accomplished.
The cables were marked for urgent handling. Yet the conversation was terrifyingly slow, delayed by differences in time zones and when people were awake, by coding and decoding of the messages, by the need to make very quiet inquiries in Washington. They were written in hurried telegraphic language, meant to be precise, yet often ambiguous. Brief texts sent by electric pulses were a method of miscommunication.
Only the next evening did Friedman answer. The message to Maxwell, he said, had been sent “in the Military Intelligence Code, which is [a] large two-part code enciphered with tables changed every two months. New table became effective on 1st May.” Moreover, the code was no longer in use between Cairo and Washington, Friedman said. On June 3, it had been replaced with an American electric cipher machine. In other words, even if the Germans had succeeded in reading a message in April, the code would have become illegible again in May and vanished in June.12
A few hours later, another cable arrived from the War Department. The “facts here,” Friedman said, lead us to believe that the “alleged compromise” was due not to cryptanalysis, codebreaking, but to the activity of “enemy agents.”13 Kullback, at the English end of the telegraph line, was sympathetic to this view. Back in the 1930s, when the whole staff of the Signal Intelligence Service could meet in one room, he’d helped Friedman create that code. He didn’t readily believe that someone had cracked it.14 And according to Friedman’s information on the changes in the cipher system, if the leak was continuing, as it was, the Germans’ source had to be a spy, one who had access to messages going from and to Cairo.
BY NOW IT was June 12. In the evening, Menzies gave Churchill a packet intended to answer the prime minister’s questions about the RAF repair crews in Egypt. It contained Air Marshal Tedder’s note from Cairo and a cover letter from Chief of Air Staff Charles Portal, commander of the RAF. The cipher security experts had confirmed “that the Germans are reading an American cypher in use between Washington and Egypt,” Portal said. “Action has already been taken to rectify this.”
That was vague for Churchill’s tastes. He scribbled a note for Menzies. “Report what steps you have taken about the cipher,” it said in bright red.15
The next thing Menzies did was to send a note to Portal, saying he’d passed on his letter to the prime minister. “In point of fact,” Menzies told Portal, “as a result of my communications with the American Crypto-Analyst Bureau,” he had doubts about the Germans reading a US cipher. (By “my communications,” he apparently meant Tiltman’s; by Crypto-Analyst Bureau, he meant the SIS.) Instead, “there is a possibility that a traitor is providing the Germans with the contents of certain messages.”
Menzies said he was still investigating. (This meant: Tiltman, Dudley-Smith, and Storey were still investigating.) In the meantime, he was sure Portal would agree that it was best not to bother Churchil
l with “this alternative form of leakage.”16
DESPITE HIS FRIENDSHIP with Friedman, Tiltman stepped aside in favor of the “bulldog.” Bletchley Park director Edward Travis wrote the next cables to Friedman. “Our source is the highest German security system,” Travis said, meaning Enigma. The German message from “a particularly reliable source” about maintaining US planes so precisely followed the American text that one could see where the German translator misunderstood the English.
Besides that, he said, the German War Office had recently been sending messages to the Panzer Army, all referring to “a Good Source.” At first, Bletchley Park hadn’t connected them with intelligence attributed to a “secret service report.” But then a detail had clicked into place: a single German message on April 30 had quoted “Good Source” reports from five dates over more than two months. They wouldn’t have all been forwarded to Rommel at the same time, Travis said, if an agent had been steadily sending them. Instead, “it was possible that [the] cypher first became compromised about the end of April.” Then the German codebreakers would have gone back and begun decoding earlier messages.
Travis sent snippets of three more Good Source reports so that Friedman’s people could look for the American messages on which they were based. The most recent of these cited information from the Good Source on June 7. Travis didn’t mention that the Germans had sent this on June 9 and Hut 6 had deciphered it on June 11.17 Nor did he mention that every German text citing a Good Source had come in Chaffinch, an army key of Enigma. The other appellations, such as “particularly reliable source,” came from air force messages. Travis was keeping his telegram condensed.
But the pattern seemed clear. Bletchley Park was picking up messages from two different branches of the German military that depended on the same source. As breaking Chaffinch got quicker and more frequent, more “Good Source” reports showed up. They showed that the Germans were also getting faster at sending these reports—a sign of steady improvement at codebreaking. And despite Friedman’s assertion about changing the code, the Germans were apparently still reading it.
A personal message from Kullback to Friedman followed. He didn’t think the Germans had worked out the American codebook. When you do that, you figure out the code equivalent for one word at a time, and part of the codebook remains unknown. The Germans had translated every word of the message about the incompetent technicians. That indicated they could have an intact copy of the codebook, and perhaps of the cipher tables. The alternative was that a spy in Cairo had obtained the American messages. But in that case, Kullback asked, why send the intelligence to Berlin instead of radioing it directly to Rommel in Libya?18
THE MEMO FOR Auchinleck’s intelligence chief came from the blandly named Inter-Services Liaison Department—in fact, the MI6 station in Cairo. It cited a report from “Triangle”—the local codeword for decrypted messages from Bletchley Park—which said that Almasy had returned to his starting point in Libya by May 28. We missed him, MI6’s man said. The search in Sudan was being called off.19
In Cairo, Eppler and Sandy were unnoticed, unpursued, invisible.
THE MORNING AFTER Bir Hakeim fell, Churchill cabled Auchinleck. The battle had lasted two grinding weeks. It looked like the Eighth Army was holding on, which meant bleeding more slowly than Rommel’s forces. Auchinleck had told the prime minister that Ritchie’s forces had lost 10,000 men, “of whom 8,000 may be prisoners.” But 25,000 reinforcements had arrived, and more were on ships that had already passed the Cape on their way to Suez. The Eighth Army still had just over 300 tanks; it had lost 350.
It would be best to win with a masterstroke, Churchill told Auchinleck in response to this information. But, he added, “we have no reason to fear a prolonged betaille d’usure,” a battle of attrition. “Please give my compliments to Ritchie,” Churchill wrote, “and tell how much his dogged and resolute fighting is admired by the vast audience which follows every move.”
Thank you for your encouragement, Auchinleck wrote back. “Our losses have been heavy… but as you say, our resources are greater than his”—Rommel’s—“and his situation is not enviable.”
Churchill and Auchinleck may have meant what they said.20 Or each may have been working to keep the other’s confidence up, and his own. Sometimes seeing through brief words to the mood behind them is like looking through a sandstorm to see whether there are tanks on the horizon.
A German commander gave an order that every truck that took troops forward had to bring back empty water containers, so they could be refilled and taken back. An Italian commander complained that his corps was desperately short of trucks for supplies. These shards of information from the Libyan desert came in messages deciphered in the distant chill of Bletchley Park. Rommel had given orders not to fire artillery against tank attacks since “the ammunition situation is strained.” Only antitank guns should be used, he ordered. Aircraft fuel was running low, the Luftwaffe’s quartermaster in Africa said.21
Rommel got word from Rome: Kesselring had met with Mussolini and Cavallero, the Italian commander in chief. They’d agreed that Rommel’s next goal should be taking Gazala, at the northeast end of the British defensive line. Kesselring did not see besieging Tobruk as a “binding” objective, but only as a possibility to be weighed later. He was concerned about “the supply problem” and not leaving “our troops completely exhausted.”22
By the time those instructions reached him, Rommel had already sent his divisions northwest from Bir Hakeim—not toward Gazala, but deep behind the British line, toward the Knightsbridge strongpoint and the fortifications at a place called El Adem, on the way to Tobruk. He’d been delayed two weeks. He had not changed his plan. His answer to quartermasters, and to staff-college-trained generals who listened to them, was to move fast and win before supplies ran out. While he led an armored division toward El Adem, his column was hit with bombs that German dive-bombers had ditched to gain speed as the RAF pursued them. Rommel “escaped once again without a scratch,” he’d recall. Yet again, he’d shown that the odds didn’t apply to him.
At Knightsbridge, his forces struck the British from three sides, while the wind turned the air into a cloud of sand. “The slaughter of British tanks went on,” he’d write. By the night of June 13, the Eighth Army was down to seventy tanks.
“Garrison of Knightsbridge withdrawn night 13/14 June,” Ritchie radioed Auchinleck. In the morning, “the enemy started his expected thrust” northward, toward the coast, Ritchie said.
“Dear Lu,” Rommel wrote to his wife. “The battle has been won and the enemy is breaking up… I needn’t tell you how delighted I am… Perhaps we will now see each other in July after all.”23
WITH CHURCHILL IMPATIENT for him to report on having shut down the leak, Menzies concluded he had to admit to having a problem. “There are at least three American cyphers in use between Cairo and Washington,” he told the prime minister on June 14, “and until the Americans inform me which cypher was used for the message in question, it is impossible to determine whether the Germans have broken a cypher, or whether there is a traitor who is betraying information and transmitting it to the enemy by secret channel.”24
At first glance, Menzies’s note was strange. Friedman had already said that the “message in question”—to Maxwell, about the aircraft technicians—had moved in the Military Intelligence Code. Yet Friedman had also said that code had gone out of use on the Washington-Cairo link. Menzies apparently understood that a different system might have been compromised—or that there was in fact a spy in the mansion on El Nabatat Street. The only thing certain is that nothing was yet certain, and the leak continued.
Travis lost patience. “Further information from ‘Good Source’ reveals our future plans,” he cabled Friedman the same day, “and matter becomes of extreme urgency.” The source was sending information that would cost British lives.
To help trace the leak, Travis sent Friedman two examples of Good Source messages conveying particul
arly dangerous intelligence. One example was the first line of a much longer message. It said, “Good Source reports on 10th June: British made costly mistakes resulting in extraordinary losses.”25 The rest of that message had included the location of a long list of Eighth Army units—thereby giving Rommel a map of British positions just before he began his successful drive toward Knightsbridge and El Adem.
Travis did send the full text of the second German message. “Good Source reports on June 11th: It is intended simultaneously to attack aircraft on 9 Axis aerodromes, on the night of 12th–13th June with sabotage units. Attack to be carried out by parachutists and patrols of the Long Range Desert Group, using sticker bombs.”26
The Bletchley Park log does not record what happened next in Washington. But it could not have taken more than an immediate, discreet visit by an SIS staffer to the British Empire Section of the Military Intelligence Division to learn within minutes that the first text was from Bonner Fellers’s Cable 1118, Part 2, of June 10.27 The second came nearly verbatim from his Cable 1119, radioed the following morning, though a translator had garbled it a bit: Fellers had written that the raids would be on the “nights of June 12th June 13th”—meaning two consecutive nights.
This should have produced shouts of “Eureka!” at the SIS. There could be no doubt: the British were relaying the texts of Fellers’s radiograms.
And yet, amid their lingering distrust of the British and their reluctance to believe their own code had been compromised, the Americans balked at the implication: The Germans were intercepting and reading encoded mail between Cairo and the War Department—mail with explosive implications.
War of Shadows Page 31
