by Max Hastings
2 THE BRITISH: GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS
The reputation of MI6 was unmatched by that of any other secret service. Though Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Japan’s generals shared a scepticism, or even scorn, about the old lion’s fitness to fight, they viewed its spies with extravagant respect, indeed cherished a belief in their omniscience. British prowess in clandestine activity dated back to the sixteenth century at least. Francis Bacon wrote in his History of the Reign of King Henry VII: ‘As for his secret Spials, which he did employ both at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practises and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it.’ Queen Elizabeth I’s Sir Francis Walsingham was one of history’s legendary spymasters. Much later came the romances of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, of dashing ‘clubland heroes’ who played chess for England with a thousand live pieces across a board that spanned continents. A wartime British secret servant observed: ‘Practically every officer I met in that concern, at home and abroad, was, like me, imagining himself as Hannay.’ The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr told the scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones that he was happy to cooperate with the British secret service because ‘it was run by a gentleman’.
British intelligence had enjoyed a good Great War. The Royal Navy’s codebreakers, such men as Dillwyn Knox and Alastair Denniston, labouring in the Admiralty’s Room 40, provided commanders with a wealth of information about the motions of the German High Seas Fleet. The decryption and public revelation of Berlin’s 1917 Zimmermann Telegram, urging the Mexicans to take aggressive action against the United States, played a critical role in bringing the Americans into the war. For two years after the November 1918 Armistice, the secret service was deeply involved in the Allies’ unsuccessful attempt to reverse the outcome of the Russian Revolution. Even after this was abandoned, the threat from international communism remained the foremost preoccupation of British espionage and counter-espionage.
Yet amid the inter-war slump, funding was squeezed. MI6 mouldered, to an extent little understood by either Britain’s friends or foes. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian who became one of its wartime officers, wrote: ‘Foreign intelligence services envied the British secret service; it was their idealised model … It enjoyed the reputation of an invisible, implacable force, like the Platonic world-spirit, operating everywhere. To the Nazi government, it was at the same time a bogey and an ideal … The reality … was rather different.’ MI6’s senior officers were men of moderate abilities, drawn into the organisation by the lure of playing out a pastiche of Kipling’s ‘Great Game’, and often after earlier careers as colonial policemen.
They masqueraded as passport control officers in embassies abroad, or shuffled paper in the service’s austere – indeed, frankly squalid – headquarters beside St James’s Park underground station, in Broadway Buildings, a place of threadbare carpets and unshaded lightbulbs. MI6 sustained a quirky tradition of paying its staff tax-free and in cash, but so small a pittance that a private income was almost essential for officers who aspired to an upper-middle-class lifestyle, which meant all of them. Though its budget was progressively increased from £180,000 in 1935 to £500,000 in 1939, few graduates entered the service, because its bosses did not want them. MI6, in the view of one practitioner, was designed merely to receive intelligence rather than actively to procure it. It was run by a coterie of anti-intellectual officers who saw their principal, if not sole, task as that of combating revolutionary communism. The shift of emphasis to monitoring Nazis and fascists during the late pre-war period caused great difficulties.
Some recruits of that period proved ill-suited to the essential nastiness of espionage. Lt. Cmdr Joseph Newill, a retired sailor posted to Scandinavia in 1938 on the strength of speaking Norwegian, wailed to London: ‘I doubt whether I have the natural guile so essential for this work!’ Newill complained that his role involved much more hard labour than he had expected. He told his station chief petulantly: ‘I am 52 and I am not going to work myself to death at my time of life.’ But he was kept in the job, and contrived to meet Broadway’s undemanding standards. MI6’s Shanghai station chief, Harry Steptoe, operated under cover as vice-consul. A jaunty little cock-sparrow figure who affected a moustache and monocle, he puzzled a foreign diplomat by his appearance at receptions in a lovat-green suit adorned with gold braid. Was this, demanded the diplomat, the full-dress uniform of the British secret service? When the Japanese interned Steptoe in 1942, they dismissed the possibility that such a comic figure could be a spymaster, and instead subjected to brutal interrogation a hapless British Council representative, whose field of knowledge was exclusively cultural.
Broadway struggled to secure intelligence from the Continent. In 1936 a new MI6 department was formed to monitor Germany and Italy. Z Section was run by Claude Dansey, a former imperial soldier who bore a haversack groaning with blimpish prejudices, among them a loathing for Americans. It became an almost independent fiefdom, which operated under commercial cover from offices in Bush House in The Strand. Its sources were mostly elderly retreads such as the Lithuanian Baron William de Ropp, who for more than a decade extracted from the British £1,000 a year – a handsome competence – in return for fragments of German political gossip. The Nazis were well aware of de Ropp’s role, and fed him what they wanted London to hear. In August 1938 the Baron decided that his secret life had become too fraught, and wisely retired to Switzerland.
Naval engineer Dr Karl Kruger’s story had a darker ending. From 1914 to 1939 he fed some good information to the British on a cash-and-carry basis, but vanished from sight a month before the outbreak of war. His file at Broadway was eventually marked ‘Agent presumed “dead”.’ This was not surprising, because Kruger – like most of MI6’s German informants – was controlled by its Hague station, where one of the local staff, Folkert van Koutrik, was on the Abwehr’s payroll. The service’s best pre-war humint source was Wolfgang Gans Edler zu Putlitz, press attaché at the German embassy in London, an aristocrat and homosexual. He was run by Klop Ustinov – father of the actor Peter – a Russian-born journalist who lost his newspaper job in 1935 because of his Jewishness. When Putlitz was transferred to The Hague in 1938, Ustinov followed him at MI6’s behest. After Folkert van Koutrik later betrayed the British operation in Holland, Putlitz hastily sought asylum in London.
The flow of intelligence from the Continent was thin. The Air Ministry complained about the paucity of material on the use of aircraft in the Spanish Civil War, an important issue for planners. Britain’s ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, shared with his fellow-diplomats a disdain for espionage which caused him to refuse diplomatic status to Broadway’s ‘Passport Control Officers’. Even where MI6 tried to provide German informants with wireless sets, most were reluctant to take them, because discovery of such equipment by the Gestapo ensured a death sentence for the possessor.
Very occasionally, among the mountain of rubbish that accumulated in Broadway’s files there was a pearl. In the spring of 1939 an agent codenamed ‘the Baron’, with good social connections in East Prussia, reported to his handler Harry Carr in Helsinki that the Germans were secretly negotiating with Stalin. He followed this up with a further missive in June, asserting that talks between Berlin and Moscow were making good progress. Yet this sensational pointer to the looming Nazi–Soviet Pact, which afterwards proved to have come from gossip among aristocrats working in the German Foreign Ministry, was dismissed in Broadway. To MI6’s senior officers, a devils’ pact between Stalin and Hitler seemed a fantastic notion. An authentic scoop was missed; first, because MI6, like most intelligence organisations, had an instinctive and usually prudent scepticism about its own sources; second, because what ‘the Baron’ reported ran contrary to his employers’ expectations. At that time, and indeed throughout the war, MI6 had no internal machinery for analysing incoming intelligence, though its chiefs could point out that the Axis Powers lacked this also.
Czechoslovakia a
nd Poland occupied the front line in the European confrontation with Hitler. MI6 showed little interest in collaboration with their intelligence services until March 1939, when the strategic picture changed dramatically: the British and French governments gave a security guarantee to Poland. This galvanised Broadway.
On 25 July, a British delegation composed of a naval intelligence officer together with Alastair Denniston, director of the Government Code & Cypher School, and Dillwyn Knox, one of its foremost codebreakers, joined France’s Gustave Bertrand – himself no cryptographer, but a notable facilitator and diplomat – at an exploratory meeting with their Polish counterparts led by Col. Gwido Langer, held at their cryptographic centre in the Kabackie woods near Pyry, south of Warsaw. The first day’s talks, conducted in mixed French and German, went very badly. Knox, for reasons unknown, was in a vile temper, and highly sceptical that the Poles had anything to tell worth hearing. He seemed unable to understand the methods by which they claimed to have achieved the breakthrough which had enabled them to read some German naval traffic. All the parties present were fencing, to discover each other’s state of knowledge. Warsaw’s decision to involve the British was prompted by new difficulties that had frustrated their own codebreakers since the Germans on 1 January adopted an enhanced stecker board, for their Enigmas, with ten plugs instead of seven. On the second day, 26 July, the conference’s atmosphere was transformed for the better. In the basement of the building the Poles showed off their ‘bomby’, primitive computing devices designed to test multiple mathematical possibilities. Then they produced a coup de théâtre: they presented both visiting delegations with mimicked copies of the Enigma built by their own men. Knox’s scepticism crumbled, and the meeting ended in a mood of goodwill and mutual respect. Everybody at Broadway recognised the importance of the Poles’ gesture to their allies as a contribution to the secret struggle against the Nazis. Marian Rejewski, a former mathematics student at Warsaw University who had joined the Kabackie woods team back in 1932, is today acknowledged as a pioneer among those who laid bare the secrets of Enigma, even if it fell to others, in Britain, to advance and exploit Rejewski’s achievement.
Stewart Menzies, then deputy chief of MI6, was so impressed by the outcome of the Polish trip that he turned up in person at Victoria station to greet Gustave Bertrand – and to inspect the mimicked Enigma. Knox sent the Poles a gift of scarves, decorated with images of Derby runners, with the letter thanking his hosts for their ‘co-operation and patience’. At or around this time also, the Poles provided the British with five of the Enigma’s eight alternative rotors. A chasm still yawned, however, between understanding how the machine worked, and achieving the ability to read its traffic. Though a trickle of German messages were broken by human ingenuity during the winter of 1939–40, traffic was breached on an industrial scale only from 1941 onwards, following the creation of revolutionary electro-mechanical technology. Nonetheless, the assistance of the French and Poles dramatically accelerated progress at the GC&CS, now evacuated from London to a safer country home. Physical possession of the enemy’s encryption instrument enabled its cryptanalysts to grasp the mountainous challenge they must overcome.
Until 1939, and in large measure for two years thereafter, British intelligence remained dependent for its view of the world upon humint – reports from informants abroad. How well did MI6 fulfil its responsibility to brief the government about the mounting threat from Nazi Germany – ‘Twelveland’ in Broadway parlance? It produced many reports arguing that Hitler’s long-term ambitions lay in the East, and this was fundamentally correct. Unfortunately for its credibility, however, in 1940 Germany chose first to seek to dispose of the Western democracies. MI6 was in no doubt that Hitler was rearming fast, but insistently emphasised the weakness of the industrial base from which he aspired to make war. Responsibility for gathering economic data rested with the Industrial Intelligence Centre, an offshoot administered since 1934 by the Foreign Office, but run by the veteran secret service officer Major Desmond Morton. During the ‘wilderness years’, Morton passed to Winston Churchill – with the sanction of prime minister Stanley Baldwin – details of German rearmament which empowered the unheeded prophet to cry forth warnings to the world. Ironically, the Major wildly overstated the growth of Hitler’s military machine: Morton never had much grasp of economics in general, nor of the Nazi economy in particular.
But modern historians critical of pre-war British intelligence failures miss some important points. In those days few people of any nationality understood economic analysis. The IIC was correct in judging that Germany was ill-prepared to conduct a long struggle, and was rendered vulnerable by its dependence on imported commodities and especially oil. The German economy, as Adam Tooze has shown, was not strong enough to meet the huge challenge Hitler sought to fulfil, of conquering the most advanced societies on earth. Germany’s GDP was no larger than Britain’s, and her people’s per capita incomes were lower. In 1939, Hitler’s expenditures on armaments had reduced his country’s finances to a parlous condition. But it was asking too much of any intelligence service to gauge the potential of German industry under the stimulus of conflict: to the very end of World War II, the best brains in the Allied nations failed fully to achieve this. MI6 could not be expected to predict Hitler’s conquests, which dramatically enhanced his access to oil, raw materials and slave labour.
On the military side, neither MI6 nor the service departments learned much about the new technology and tactics being developed by Britain’s enemies. Nor about their limitations: they wildly overrated the Luftwaffe’s ability to devastate Britain’s cities. In 1938, Broadway reported that the Germans had 927 first-line bombers capable of mounting 720 sorties a day and dropping 945 tons of ordnance (this was an exaggeration of 50 per cent), and projections of likely casualties were even more inflated. War Office appreciations of the German army were equally mistaken, especially in estimating its potential mobilised strength. These suggested in 1939 that Hitler was already master of the largest war machine his nation’s resources could bear. Rearmament, coupled with vast public expenditure, ‘had taxed the endurance of the German people and the stability of the economic system to a point where any further effort can only be achieved at the risk of a breakdown of the entire structure’.
A February 1939 Strategical Appreciation by the chiefs of staff, drafted by the Joint Planning Committee, asserted that Britain could survive a long war better than Germany. This was true, but the chiefs said nothing about the danger that it could meanwhile lose a short one. Moreover, they never pressed the cabinet to acknowledge the shocking weakness of Britain’s Far East empire. The three services’ intelligence branches had no contact with each other, and there were no joint staffs.
As for politics, an MI6 officer wrote in a November 1938 report for the Foreign Office: ‘Not even Hitler’s intimates, according to one of them, knows if he would really risk world war.’ A few months later, the service’s credibility was severely injured by its issue of warnings that Germany intended imminently to strike at Western Europe, starting with Holland. Embarrassment was increased by the fact that the Foreign Office forwarded this alarm call to the US government. One of the British recipients, senior civil servant Sir George Mounsey, delivered a blast against MI6 which echoed around Whitehall. The Foreign Office’s standing was damaged, he said, by acting on the basis of ‘a highly sensational and highly disturbing kind of information which [MI6] are unable to guarantee’. Mounsey was dismissive of all covert sources, agents whose rumour-mongering had prompted Broadway’s warning: ‘They have a secret mission and they must justify it … If nothing comes to hand for them to report, they must earn their pay by finding something … Are we going to remain so attached to reliance on secret reports, which tie our hands in all directions?’ Mounsey had his own agenda: to sustain the policy of appeasement adopted by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, whom he admired prodigiously. His views nonetheless reflected a general scepticism in high places about B
roadway’s performance.
Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office, often a critic of MI6, on this occasion leapt to its defence. While acknowledging the frustrations of dealing with secret organisations, he said that he could not forget that its officers ‘did warn us of the September [1938 Munich] crisis, and they did not give any colour to the ridiculous optimism that prevailed up to the rape of Czechoslovakia, of which our official [diplomatic] reports did not give us much warning’. In December 1938 Broadway offered a sound character sketch of Germany’s Führer, at a time when many British diplomats and politicians still deluded themselves that he was a man they could do business with. ‘Among his characteristics,’ asserted the MI6 report, ‘are fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment, and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but with it all there is great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision. He has gained the reputation of being always able to choose the right moment and right method for “getting away with it”. In the eyes of his disciples, and increasingly in his own, “the Führer is always right”. He has unbounded self-confidence, which has grown in proportion to the strength of the machine he has created; but it is a self-confidence which has latterly been tempered less than hitherto with patience and restraint.’
It is easy to catalogue the shortcomings of MI6. Like most of its sister services on the Continent, in 1939 it commanded little respect in high places, and had small influence on policy-making. It seems necessary to go beyond this, however, and pose the question: what might its spies have usefully discovered, granted more resources and cleverer people? The likely answer is: not much. MI6’s reporting was matched by a daily bombardment of newspaper headlines, both showing beyond peradventure that Germany was rearming. More accurate and detailed information about Hitler’s armed forces would have been useful to the War Office and Downing Street, but the critical issue, the vital uncertainty, was not that of Germany’s capabilities, but rather that of its intentions.
