War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  THE ORDER WENT out on April 26, 1945, the day that American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe River. Victory over Germany was very near.

  The order was addressed to all those who’d known about Ultra intelligence. It warned them that they must “maintain strict secrecy both now and after the war.” They were bound by law and honor to avoid even “hinting at what they did in the war.” Several reasons were given. There could still be fighting against German undergrounds. In the Pacific, fighting would last longer; the Japanese could be given no clue that their own codes were being broken.

  Those were temporary concerns. The first and lasting reason to keep the secret was that “no possible excuse must be given to the Germans to explain away their complete defeat by force of arms… and the uncanny success of our intelligence would offer them just such an excuse.”54 Germans could not be given a pretext for thinking, as they had after 1918, that they had lost because of a fluke or a betrayal. They must not have hope for a third round.

  For Gordon Welchman and Alan Turing, for Joan Clarke and Jean Alington, for John Herivel, Mavis Lever, Russell Dudley-Smith, and Margaret Storey, for all the people who had cracked Enigma, who had broken the keys day after day, who had translated the messages and made sense of them, the order meant this: You played an extraordinary role in this victory. For victory to last, your role must be forgotten. When friends tell battle stories, when you go on a date, when anyone asks what you did in the war, you must say, “Oh, worked,” and change the subject. You made history. Now history must have no memory of you.

  EPILOGUE

  Washington–Bletchley Park–Cairo–Jerusalem.

  WAR TRANSFORMS SOME people who survive it. For others, it is an interlude. They shed revelations from the battlefield as easily as uniforms. Truths that they held beforehand and saw broken become whole again.

  Bonner Fellers belonged to the interluders.

  After a few months stateside, Fellers was reassigned in 1943 to the Pacific, to serve on the staff of his mentor and hero, Douglas Mac-Arthur. In 1946 he retired from the army. Politics on the archconservative edge of the Republican Party had been his avocation before the war, when he still wore a uniform. Now it became his profession. In Cairo, contradictions to his isolationist views had sprouted in his mind. Back home, he uprooted them.

  He worked for the Republican National Committee, backed prewar isolationist Robert Taft for president in 1952, and quit his party post when Dwight Eisenhower won the Republican nomination. Fellers became the executive director of For America, which listed “internationalism” even before fascism and socialism as ideologies it opposed. In 1956, For America kicked off its election-year program with a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York—headlined by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fellers spoke, too, denouncing NATO.

  Next, Fellers established the Citizens Foreign Aid Committee—in fact, the committee against foreign aid—and became a full-time lobbyist. Foreign aid, he said, served the Communist plot to destroy America’s economy. He publicly endorsed the John Birch Society. The fundamental idea of that organization was that every event was the result of someone’s intentional action, and that a web of conspiracy joined those actions. The only plausible explanation of Cold War setbacks abroad and political defeats for conservatives at home was treason—Communists within the ranks of American government who acted on behalf of the Kremlin.1

  Fellers’s embrace of such thinking was ironic, because the Good Source affair was devastating disproof of the conspiratorial view of human affairs. History does, indeed, contain stories hidden beneath stories. It is shaped by determined people, evil and good men and women, cowards and heroes—but very often, not as they intend.

  An American officer writing reports in a mansion on El Nabatat Street had an effect on the war far more complicated than he could have planned or imagined. There was no conspiracy in Cairo to betray Britain’s secrets. For that matter, there was no secret Allied plan to deceive Erwin Rommel, to draw him to El Alamein where his army would be shattered. Had any British general conceived of laying such a trap, the proposal would instantly have been dismissed as too dangerous. Yet Fellers drew Rommel to defeat.

  The outcome of a battle or war can seem to have been inevitable from the start. Not so, Victor Hugo wrote in a long meditation in Les Misérables on the Battle of Waterloo. “If it hadn’t rained during the night of June 17–18, 1815,” Hugo said, “the future of Europe would have been different.” That was the night before the battle. Napoleon planned to have his cannons in place at six in the morning. The rain muddied the ground, slowed the artillery carts, delayed the battle till half past eleven. By then the advance of a Prussian army, allied with the British against Napoleon, utterly changed the battlefield.

  The rain was one disaster. The other was a road that ran just beyond the crest of a hill. Napoleon knew the road was there when he sent his cavalry charging up the escarpment toward the British line. He did not know that road lay in a deep ditch, into which his horsemen plunged. A cloudburst and a rut in the earth forever changed the history of a continent.2

  In June 1942, a message from the War Department to Cairo told Fellers to change his code. Had it been radioed on time, Rommel might not have flung his tired army into Egypt. Somehow, it seems, the slip of paper with the message got lost for a week in the Washington office of RCA before it was sent. Had the message lingered longer, Rommel might have known what awaited him at El Alamein and burst through to Alexandria, Suez, Palestine, and beyond.

  A piece of paper apparently misplaced and then found on a desk changed the lives of millions and the future of the Middle East.

  A FISSURE RAN through Winston Churchill’s speech in November 1942, the one in which he declared that the final victory at El Alamein and the landings of Operation Torch marked the “end of the beginning” of the war. Churchill spoke, characteristically, against tyranny and for the “liberation of the peoples of Europe.” He also declared that he had “not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” His words revealed the contradiction in the entire British imperial project, and in Churchill himself: the tectonic clash between democracy at home and colonial rule over hundreds of millions of people outside Europe.3

  Churchill wanted to believe that the war would be a mere interlude and that the empire would endure. His words suggest he knew differently. The war could not preserve the empire. But in complex ways, it shaped what happened afterward, when the empire came undone.

  In Palestine, the end of world war reignited the local conflict. Britain, weakened and bankrupt, had no solution for irreconcilable Arab and Jewish demands. Britain’s postwar Labour government asked the United Nations to step in. The UN decision to partition Palestine set off civil war in the country.

  In the last days before Britain pulled out in May 1948 and Israel declared independence, leaders of neighboring Arab countries dithered, listened to the chanting of protesters demanding war, and at last made up their minds to invade. In Cairo, pressure on the government came from both the street and the palace. Farouk hoped to seize at least part of the land that the United Nations had allocated to the Arab state in Palestine.4

  “Morale, especially among the younger officers, was high” on the eve of the invasion, wrote Gamal Abdel Nasser, who went to war as a battalion staff officer. The Egyptian army would be fighting “volunteer groups… Zionist gangs,” thought armored corps officer Khaled Mohi El Din. “The officers and men went to the war, brimming with patriotism… but were surprised to find themselves facing an experienced enemy stationed in bunkers and fortified emplacements.”

  The Egyptians were utterly unready. “We had entered a war without any preparation,” Nasser wrote. “There was no concentration of forces, no accumulation of ammunition and equipment. There was no reconnaissance, no intelligence, no plans.” Nasser, Mohi El Din, and other young nationalists in the military looked for reasons for Egypt’s defeat. They blamed their generals. They blamed �
��weak minority governments that were submissive to the King and the British.” Their last shred of loyalty to Farouk vanished.5

  Yet one reason for Egyptian weakness was missing from their list: the Egyptian army had been absent from the harsh schooling of the world war.6 In 1940, Egypt had chosen to treat the Italian invasion as a battle between Britain and the Axis that only incidentally took place on Egyptian soil. Farouk had played the starring role in that decision, but the young officers had been even less eager to fight on Britain’s side. Abdul Rahman Azzam, in 1948 the first secretary-general of the Arab League and a key figure in Farouk’s support for invading Palestine, had brokered the 1940 deal by which Egypt turned its artillery and tanks over to the British army rather than fighting.

  Palestine’s Jews, on the other hand, had overwhelmingly chosen to put aside their anger at Britain to fight a greater enemy. By 1945, over thirty thousand Palestinian Jews had enlisted in the British forces.7 Other Jews in the new Israeli army had been trained in the Palmah or in the armies of other countries or had learned war as partisans in Europe. In the world war, the fate of Jews had been determined by where Britain and the Soviet Union had stopped the Nazi armies. The borders of genocide were the last line of British and Soviet retreat. In 1948, the fate of Jews was finally in their own hands, and they were indeed more experienced at war than the Egyptians.

  Inside Egypt, World War II had diminished the power of all three forces that had wrestled for power beforehand: King Farouk, the Wafd party, and the British themselves. The defeat of 1948 added the military high command to the list. A vacuum was waiting for someone to fill it.

  On July 23, 1952, at 7 a.m., a voice on Egyptian radio read a manifesto to the nation. Overnight, it said, “we have carried out a purge” of the “fools, traitors and incompetents” in command of the army. The “purge” was in fact a full-scale coup d’état by the Free Officers, the young men led by Nasser. The voice on the radio was that of the dismissed and reinstated officer Anwar al-Sadat.8

  Farouk was in a palace in Alexandria, on the shore. The officers ordered him to abdicate. Unlike Lampson a decade earlier, they gave him no alternatives. He was allowed six hours to pack. At the age of thirty-two, Farouk boarded his yacht and sailed away from Egypt. The new regime confiscated his lands and his collections of guns, coins, stamps, cars, Koran manuscripts, and pornography. He took enough gold with him, and had enough wealth deposited overseas, to live comfortably in exile in Italy. In 1965, the forty-five-year-old ex-king died of a heart attack. President Nasser allowed him to be buried in Egypt, at the tomb of one of his ancestors.9

  In 1967, a crisis mainly of Nasser’s making led to another war with Israel, another military debacle for Egypt, and Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, along with Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Nasser, broken, died in 1970. Sadat succeeded Nasser as president, at last rebuilt the army, and together with Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in 1973. The outcome was a military stalemate that Sadat successfully presented domestically as victory. Four years later he surprised the world even more by flying to Israel to offer peace in exchange for return of the Sinai. His initiative led to the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty.

  In 1981, as Sadat reviewed a parade commemorating the 1973 “victory,” Islamic revolutionaries shot and killed him.

  Miles Lampson had died in 1964. The longtime ambassador was thus not available to comment on how the Middle East might have been different if Sadat had been executed in 1942, as Lampson had advised. Sadat’s career can be read as an essay on how little the early chapters of a person’s life foretell the later ones.

  THE FIRST BOOK on Operation Condor was published in 1958 by Leonard Mosley, a former war correspondent. Mosley said he’d tracked down Eppler in Germany after the war and interviewed him repeatedly. This explains many, though not all, of the fictions in Mosley’s account: that Eppler was recruited in Beirut in 1938 by a female Abwehr agent who used a Vietnamese beauty as bait; that he was personally interviewed by Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris on September 1, 1939; that Eppler devised the plan to fly Aziz el-Masri out of Egypt in 1941; that Eppler arrived in Cairo in 1942 with £50,000 in British banknotes; that the belly dancer Hekmet became his lover and also seduced British officers in his service. With Hekmet’s help, Mosley wrote, Eppler got his hands on orders from Auchinleck for General Ritchie in mid-July (June and July blur in Mosley’s account), but Major Sansom of Field Security closed the net before Eppler and his partner could radio this espionage treasure to Rommel. Instead, supposedly, British headquarters used Eppler’s name and cipher to send false information to Rommel.10

  Sansom wrote his own memoir of his spy-catching days in Cairo. In it, he claimed to tell the true story of the “brave and decent” German spies, Eppler and “Monkaster,” alias Sandstede. Sansom wrote that Hekmet invited him, too, to her houseboat and tried to seduce him to protect the spies, but Sansom resisted her enticement, as it was “not quite British fair play to… make love to a woman when I might be responsible for her being executed as a spy.”11 Eppler published his own purported autobiography in 1974 in French, and afterward in English, granting himself an espionage career that began well before the war and making himself Almasy’s partner in navigating the desert.12 In a 1980 interview, Eppler boosted the amount of money he’d brought to Cairo to $5 million and the time he spent there before being caught to seven months.13

  Almasy, who’d died in 1951, could not object. The reports of Colonel G. J. Jenkins, the MI5 man who actually caught Eppler, remained classified for over sixty years. Sansom’s memoir referred only once to Jenkins, not by name but by his “lengthy nickname of ‘keep it under your hat, old boy,’ his favorite expression.”14 Jenkins wrote no memoir.

  The myths published first were quoted, retold, embellished, and quoted again, until they looked like the rock-solid history of Rommel’s man in Cairo.

  WALTHER RAUFF NEVER gave an accounting of his life. He did leave a paper trail, much of it in intelligence agency reports, some reliable, some less so. At the end of the war, according to a later CIA document, he was the SS chief in Milan in northern Italy, where US officers captured him. Two years later he escaped, and was given refuge in a Catholic convent, or perhaps a series of them. He reached Syria, where he worked for one of the country’s security agencies—possibly military intelligence, “which he reportedly attempted to reorganize along gestapo lines.” After a 1949 coup, he was arrested and expelled, eventually reaching South America. By 1958, Rauff had settled in Chile.

  Both Germany and Israel sought to extradite the man responsible for creating the mobile gas chambers in which half a million people were murdered. Chilean courts rejected the requests. In the late 1970s, Chilean political refugees claimed that Rauff was a “principal advisor” to the secret police of dictator Augusto Pinochet. In 1984, he died in Santiago of lung cancer. “It was God that made justice,” a Nazi-hunter commented; human courts had failed.15

  THE GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATIONS Headquarters produced a different kind of historical account: dozens of fat volumes, marked “Top Secret Ultra,” intended for very few eyes, so that staffers of the future could learn from the successes and frustrations of the people who eavesdropped on the Axis. The history of Hut 4’s work, naval intelligence, ran to fifteen volumes. There were only two women among the authors, a reflection of how few had held senior posts. Only one volume, on German and Italian signal intelligence, had a woman as sole author—the slight, shy woman who’d started at Bletchley Park in 1940 with the rank of “untrained clerk,” Margaret Storey.16

  GCHQ moved out of Bletchley Park, then moved again to the town of Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, west of London. Storey moved with it. She had a very small circle of friends. She never spoke of her wartime work. Keeping things to herself came naturally, which is why the whisper of her one lover is impossible to track down. She had a nervous shake in her late years. In 1990, all her secrets inside her, she died.17

  Like her, Russell Dudl
ey-Smith had found his life’s work at GCHQ. Like her, he smoked incessantly. When he visited Washington in the 1950s and stayed with John Tiltman’s daughter, he had a hacking cough. Dudley-Smith’s own daughter knew that he went to the office early and came home late but had no idea what he did there. He died in 1966, at age fifty-five. The obituary in the Gloucestershire Echo mentioned his interest in botany and Roman archaeology in Britain and that he headed a division at GCHQ, but could say nothing of what he’d done in the war.18

  Marian Rejewski returned to Poland in 1946, a risky move because the new Communist regime was suspicious of anyone tied to the army-in-exile of the old regime. But his wife and children were there. He moved from one anonymous job as an accountant to another.19

  Alan Turing left GCHQ at the war’s end to work in the genesis of electronic computers. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted of “gross indecency,” meaning consensual homosexual relations. Given a choice of prison or “chemical castration,” hormonal treatment to suppress the libido, he chose the latter. Two years later he committed suicide, intentionally leaving evidence that he’d accidentally poisoned himself, so as to soften the blow to his mother.20

  Edward Travis served as the director of GCHQ until his retirement in 1952. There was no place left for Alastair Denniston, the first head of the agency and the man who’d overseen the original, seemingly hopeless struggle to break Enigma. He was pushed out with a small pension in 1945, before victory over Japan, and became a French and Latin teacher at a prep school. He was anonymous when he died in 1961.21