Vera made one hurried journey to Poland earlier in that 1939 summer. On her own, as a mild office worker, she could travel directly through Germany. She made a quick reconnaissance of Lithuania, where Hitler annexed the Memel region.
Vera went on to Warsaw. She had been told she could trust a gorgeous young part-Jewish Polish aristocrat, Countess Krystyna Gyziska Skarbek, who was home on leave from her East African plantation in Kenya. She was already thinking ahead about underground resistance, and introduced Vera to an engineer who was also a Polish air force pilot, Jan “Zura” Zurakowski, reputed to be among the best Polish pilots and engaged to marry a seventeen-year-old student friend of Krystyna. “When Hitler breaks his nonaggression pact with Poland and his armed forces attack us,” he told Vera, “I have to fight in a high-winged, fixed-undercarriage P.11 that is eight years old and moves at half the speed of German warplanes. We need modern fighters. For God's sake, tell London to spare us a few, but quickly.”
Krystyna's mother was Jewish, one of three million Jews still in Poland. From the new German protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia came news that racial laws already applied, that Adolf Eichmann was running a Reich Central Office for Jewish Immigration in Prague, and that a women-only camp was being set up near Berlin. It was called Ravensbrück.
Vera confirmed that a brilliant Jewish mathematician had worked with other code breakers on an Enigma machine shipped to the German embassy in Warsaw. Before it was delivered, they had taken it apart overnight. Since then they had worked out Enigma settings that constantly changed in a highly secret version, and constructed a cyclometer that linked two Enigmas, and another device they called a bombe to handle six interconnected Enigmas. They were willing to part with replicas if the worst happened. Vera left Warsaw, concerned that this vital information had been so long withheld, and traveled first to consult a friend, the French secret-service chief of codes and ciphers, Colonel Louis Rivet of the Service de Renseignements. She asked him about French use of Hans-Thilo Schmidt in the Berlin Cipher Office. Rivet said Hans-Thilo's first dealings had been with a French secret service agent on the German-Belgian border back in 1931. Hans-Thilo had offered manuals for a coding machine. He was then in his midforties and had financial worries. The later risks he took in supplying updates on Enigma's changing procedures suggested that money was not the motive. His grandmother was English, his mother a baroness, his father a professor of history. His brother Rudolf, a general who headed the panzer parade in Berlin, had been chief executive at the Cipher Office from 1925 to 1928, and brought in Hans-Thilo, who soon had access to ciphers for the armed forces and the complex coding machine Enigma. Hans-Thilo had been a relatively young businessman when Germany suffered the raging inflation that saw the value of money sink daily. He had abandoned the illusion, shared by millions, that Hitler was a genius who could solve the country's penury. His initial contact used the alias Rodolphe Lemoine and served the French secret service under the code name Rex. Vera asked Colonel Rivet how the French were exploiting Hans-Thilo. The intelligence chief gave a hollow laugh. “Enigma is not seen as important. Our generals waste resources on training intelligence officers in old methods used in the last war, to get the same old answers to the same old questions.”
Vera returned to London to hear Chamberlain promise that Britain would guarantee Poland's independence. Then he went off to tramp the Yorkshire moors. The British empire's chiefs of staff were on their summer holidays. Two weeks before Poland was invaded, Lord Halifax went fishing in Scotland. He sent salmon packed in ice to his Foreign Office underlings.
Vera heard an eye-witness account of Churchill's encounter with the Duke of Westminster. “Churchill had been dining at the Savoy Grill and looked tired and old,” Bill Stephenson told her. “All his warnings were proving sound. But it all seemed too late.” The duke was with friends. “Someone called Churchill a Jew-lover who conspired against Germany. Churchill stood with head bowed and said, ‘We're a family with the wrong members in control.’”
More young officers risked careers to disclose infirmities within the Chamberlain government. A secret intelligence service officer, Anthony Cavendish, said later that the SIS chief “‘deplored the violation of decent moral conduct!’ The prudery was breathtakingly hypocritical. It condemned the very same things that were his stock-in-trade. We lie from the first day in the service. Our cover makes us liars. SIS puts a man in other government departments. The borders become blurred between private conscience and public duty. The secret agent becomes expert at blackmail. You betray friends, break confidences. Official versions of events are doctored. Weeders hide documents, not to defend national security but to protect careers. It is dangerous for a private citizen to antagonize the SIS. It has character assassination down to a fine art.”2
Vera became doubly cautious. Sir Vernon Kell, who had run MI5, the internal security service, since its inception in 1909, was saying Soviet spy networks were 90 percent Jewish. This was repeated one evening by a senior MI5 man who was Vera's dinner partner and took her to be a well-behaved Christian. He said: “Jews have no loyalty to the countries in which they live.”
Hugh Dalton, as parliamentary undersecretary to the Foreign Office in the Labour government of 1929–31, had overseen the SIS and told Vera that Kell had been “prepared to destroy every file, rather than let records fall into the hands of Jews and Russian agents in the socialist party.” Rudyard Kipling summed it up: “You would credit anything about Russia's designs but a little bit of sober fact is more than you can stand.”
Dalton was earmarking young men who took risks, bankers or bank robbers, anyone willing to serve what was called the Left Wing, the secret teams he was already sending abroad.
She asked him, “Why the term Left Wing?”
“It applies to ancillary units attached to secret missions that the War Office can disown,” he said. “They call us Left Wingers. Yet we're private enterprisers, like the privateers whose letters of marque from Queen Elizabeth made them pirates in her secret service. She let them hang if they got caught.”
Selected “pirates” now were sent abroad, their expenses met from the Secret Fund or out of their own pocket. George Taylor, a thick-skinned Australian, disliked being treated as a colonial and rejoiced in helping the planners of closework. He provided a country house near Hatfield in Hertfordshire for training agents, beyond the control of the SIS.
Skepticism about any Nazi threat had been reflected in an entry for Wednesday, March 29, 1939, in the diary of a Foreign Office permanent undersecretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan: “Ian Colvin [reporter for the News Chronicle] came and saw H [Lord Halifax] and me and Rex [Sir Reginald Leeper, head of the Foreign Office news department] and gave hair-raising details of imminent German thrust against Poland. I was not entirely convinced. I am getting used to these stories.” Ian Colvin was one of many young foreign correspondents who had difficulty persuading editors to print their accounts of Nazi intentions.3
Vera had a pool of talent among newsmen like Colvin. One was the Manchester Guardian's Frederick Voigt. Through his bank account, Vera sent payments to Krystyna Skarbek. Such reporters believed that information belonged in their newspapers, not whispered into the ear of a civil servant. Colvin, back on his Berlin beat, learned that the German financial secretary, Schwerin von Krosigk, had told British diplomats that Churchill must be given a ministerial post because there was no other way to convince Hitler that Britain really would fight if pushed too hard.
In June 1939, Gubby and Vera had traveled to Poland to talk with its intelligence experts. They were back in July. In Warsaw they visited an Englishman, small, sparrowlike, with bright blue eyes, identified only by the initials AGD. He was a veteran of Admiral Blinker Hall's Room 40 in the 1914–18 war. Room 40 had pioneered the decoding of enemy messages.
At meetings with Poland's military chiefs, Gubby promised, “If the Germans overrun you, I will take responsibility for providing every possible aid to a Polish guerrilla army.” Gu
bby staked his personal honor upon support for what they spoke of as the Home Army.4
Others in London would break Gubby's heart by betraying the promise. “The betrayal haunted him all his life,” said Vera.
10
Betrayals All Around
On the night of July 24–25, 1939, the Poles had unveiled for a secret team of English experts the computer-like mechanism they called a bombe, better able to run through Enigma permutations than the first cyclometers. For years before their bombe, they could read only bits of coded traffic, and were left far behind when Enigma began to develop a capacity that would eventually produce 10.5 quadrillion permutations. Enigma was an electric machine that looked like a large typewriter. The simplest explanation given Vera was that it could be set up in a million different ways. The operator typed out a plain-language sentence and Enigma converted this to a jumble for transmission by wireless. To get the jumble back to plain text, the recipient had to have a machine exactly like that of the sender, whose Enigmas encoded through a combination of rotors and plugboards with key settings that were frequently changed. Outsiders trying to make sense of the jumble had to look for clues and giveaway repetitions. German senders were issued new settings at least once a day.
Vera had to look ahead. The accrued experience of the Poles was almost impossible to pass along through a third party. It would be necessary to smuggle into England the best Polish cryptanalyst at the University of Poznan, Marian Rejewski. His small team had been breaking codes, only to have to start again when the Germans modified their machines. The German defense ministry's Berlin Cipher Office thought the system defied penetration. But the Polish bombes offered a way into orders sent by wireless to Germany's armed forces.
If breaking Enigma codes was essential to Britain's survival, none of the code breakers, nor Hans-Thilo Schmidt, must be caught. He was a member of the Nazi Party, #738736, which made her uneasy. His history unraveled at a meeting outside Warsaw with code breakers and representatives of Britain's Government Code and Cipher School. Now Vera knew who AGD was: Commander Alastair G. Denniston, acting head of GCCS. And for the first time she understood why Louis Rivet in Paris had been so cagey. The Poles had pulled off a coup, and Rivet's French secret service chiefs had issued strict instructions to disclose nothing.
For Vera, Hans-Thilo came into tighter focus. He had trained as a chemist. His mathematical skills led to his compilation of new field codes with a short working life, destroyed after use. He distributed the codes himself, and he was authorized to sign his own travel warrants. After French intelligence contacted him, Hans-Thilo delivered two documents that caught the attention of Gustave Bertrand, head of the Deciphering Section of the Service de Renseignements. Hans-Thilo's manuals referred to the Enigma machine used by the German army.
Back in 1929, the early commercial version of Enigma had arrived for the German embassy in Warsaw. There followed a hectic weekend while two engineers, Ludomir Danilewicz and Antoni Palluth, proprietors of the small Warsaw communications company AVA, drew details of the machine before forwarding it to the embassy. The chief of the German section of Poland's cipher bureau, Maksymilian Ciezki, picked out three bright students, Henryk Zygalski, Jerzy Rozycki, and Marian Rejewski. They worked with the cipher bureau's chief, Gwido Langer, to replicate the wiring inside the Enigma. This was finally completed in 1932, with help from Hans-Thilo's documents. The Poles read German military messages until stumped by Enigma's infinity of variations.
Vera foresaw the need to keep track of the Polish cryptographers, if they had to make a run for it through Nazi-dominated European countries. Then the Enigma secret would be in jeopardy. There had already been one narrow squeak. In Berlin, Hans-Thilo Schmidt's routine was to phone a French journalist and say, “Uncle Kurt has died,” if he had anything to report. This prefaced meetings at Charlottenburg railway station. Hans-Thilo would then give the Frenchman new information. On November 6, 1937, documents were delivered by the journalist to the French embassy. But Ambassador André François-Poncet disregarded a warning that diplomatic codes were routinely broken by the Germans. He telegraphed to Paris a summary of Hans-Thilo's latest haul: Hitler's outline for his generals of a timetable for the conquest of Western Europe.
The French telegram was intercepted by the Germans. Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the army intelligence service, was told to investigate. His inquiry was lackadaisical. Vera believed Canaris wanted the British and French to learn of the timetable, and spark Anglo-French action to stop Hitler. Hans-Thilo Schmidt was a liaison officer between the Berlin Cipher Office and Germany's Air Ministry Research Bureau. Canaris cleared him of suspicion and sent him to Switzerland in January 1938 to give British intelligence a copy of the report on Canaris's investigation into the leak!1
The Poles, the French, and the British knew Hans-Thilo Schmidt under different code names. There were also differences in the definition of “code breakers.” The word “code” did not refer to the replacement of plain-language text by Enigma's scrambled letters, for which the proper term was cipher-text. Many who later worked on Enigma at Bletchley Park spoke of code breakers and code for simplicity's sake. Gordon Welchman, at Bletchley, later described to Vera how it came about that different secret agencies offered different accounts of these events because of separate definitions and paths to the same solutions.
For example, Vera heard from the Poles about their cardboard perforation sheets. The sheets were stacked on top of each other over a light, and the places where the light shone through gave clues to current Enigma settings. At Bletchley the first working computer, Colossus, replaced these perforation sheets. “Prior to Colossus, each time the Germans introduced more wheels or connected more plugboard sockets, our work with the cardboard sheets began all over again,” said Welchman.2
After this summer “look around” in Poland, Vera left Warsaw on her own and traveled by train across the Polish-Romanian border, looking for future overland escape routes. In Bucharest, at the British legation, she read the text of a prophetic broadcast by Churchill on August 8, 1939: “Holiday time, ladies and gentlemen. Holiday time, my friends across the Atlantic! Holiday time, when the summer calls the toilers of all countries for an all too brief spell.” Churchill asked, “How had the world spent its summer holidays when the 1914 war broke out? Why!” he exclaimed. “Those were the very days when the German advance guards were breaking into Belgium and trampling down its people on their march towards Paris! Today, there is a hush all over Europe. Listen! No, listen carefully. I think I hear something. Yes, there it was, quite clear. Don't you hear it? It is the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italians ‘going on maneuvers’… yes, only on maneuvers. After all, the dictators must train their soldiers. They could scarcely do less in common prudence, when the Danes, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Albanians—and of course the Jews—may leap out upon them at any moment.”
Two weeks later the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow. Count von der Schulenburg should have rejoiced. The dream he had shared with Vera, the prevention of war between Germany and Russia, seemed to have come true. Yet he was not as happy as he should have been.
In a letter to Vera before the pact, Schulenburg described Ribbentrop assuring Vyacheslav Molotov, commissar for Soviet foreign affairs, there was no appetite for war anywhere in Britain. This neutralized Stalin's scheme to make a pact with France and Britain against Germany.
Stalin had reversed his scheme. Why? Vera learned that at the time of Churchill's inflammatory broadcast, Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax had sailed on a slow cargo-ship from England to negotiate a pact with the Soviet Union. He disembarked in Leningrad, stretching out his journey, and reached Moscow on August 11, 1939. Then he announced that he had forgotten to bring along his written authority. Irate Russian generals broke off the talks. Stalin believed England's priority was to start a war between the Nazis and Russia and that Sir Reginald's amnesia was a
hoax.
“Churchill's broadcast was interpreted as hot air,” Billy Stephenson speculated when Vera got back to London. “The dictators figured we had no intention of fighting against anyone. The Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax fiasco led to this pact, but history won't record it.”
The German-Soviet pact included secret protocols allowing Russia to seize half of Poland. Schulenburg wrote to Vera that Soviet intelligence had copies of letters from Hitler to the Duke of Windsor expressing a fervent wish to avoid war and hoping the duke would act as a friend of the Third Reich, which in return would help him to recover his throne.3
SIS officers in Moscow had given London no warning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Vera recalled that “a former Rhodes scholar, Baron Adam von Trott zu Solz, a dedicated anti-Nazi, got around London a lot and told me about upper-class English families whose pro-Nazi stance discouraged those in Berlin who needed support against Hitler. One fascist-minded family regularly entertained Queen Mary to tea, and had a son, Anthony Blunt, in our secret services, who reinforced Germany's impression we'd stay neutral.” Mary Stephenson commented, when Blunt was finally exposed as a Soviet spy, that Blunt had been given his postwar sinecure as Keeper of the Queen's Pictures only to guarantee his silence on the incriminating letters written by British royals to Hitler that Blunt had rescued from a castle in the American zone soon after Nazi Germany collapsed.
Vera, in this tense year of 1939, aware of some betrayals and sensitive to the likelihood of more, wondered if Chamberlain was going to dump Poland and remain neutral, after promising to declare war once Germany marched into Poland on some trumped-up excuse about Polish aggression.
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