by Max Hastings
In 1940 and 1941, Donovan made trips to London during which Stephenson ensured that he received red-carpet treatment, including lunch with the prime minister. Some British officers recoiled from the visitor’s brashness. Maj. Gen. John Kennedy, director of military operations, wrote in his diary: ‘Donovan … is extremely friendly to us & a shrewd and pleasant fellow and good talker. But I could not but feel that this fat & prosperous lawyer, a citizen of a country not in the war … possessed very great assurance to be able to lay down the law so glibly about what we and other threatened nations should & sh[oul]d not do.’
Donovan’s influence at the White House nonetheless ensured continuing British gratitude and goodwill. In September 1940 he persuaded Roosevelt to commit the US to a policy of intelligence collaboration with Churchill’s nation. When Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence, visited the US in May 1941 with his personal assistant Commander Ian Fleming, in New York the two men stayed at Donovan’s apartment. The admiral’s trip was not an unqualified success: he was shocked by the depth of hostility between the US Army and US Navy, and got little change out of Hoover, who was less interested in joining the war against the Axis than in securing the FBI’s monopoly control of the nation’s intelligence activities. In this, Hoover was unsuccessful. While his Bureau retained responsibility for counter-espionage – the role of MI5 in Britain – Godfrey and Stephenson played some part in convincing the Roosevelt administration that the country needed a new intelligence organisation, and that Donovan was the man to run it. From July 1941 he held the title of Coordinator of Information, though in reality his new Office of War Information was an embryo secret service, and he set about supervising its birth and precocious growth with energy and exuberance.
Donovan and Stephenson – the latter known in the US as ‘Little Bill’ rather than ‘Intrepid’, which was merely his telegraphic address – were buccaneers both, who shared credit for securing a reasonably free hand for British intelligence operations in the Americas, against the wishes of the FBI and the State Department. Their rapport did not, however, change an overarching reality: the wartime relationship between Britain and the United States was characterised by tensions and suspicions, merely painted over by the magnificent rhetoric of Churchill and Roosevelt. In 1940–41 the British were fighting for their lives while Americans were not, and indeed operated a cash-and-carry policy for the modest quota of weapons and supplies they sold to Churchill’s people. Most of America’s defence community had some respect for Britain, but little affection.
The British officers privy to the Ultra secret knew that they were custodians of one of their country’s most precious assets, which would become instantly forfeit if any hint of their growing successes reached Berlin. American security was poor, as might be expected of a people not yet committed to the struggle, who were anyway constitutionally ill-suited to keeping secrets. British intelligence chiefs were eager for American goodwill, but doubtful how much of practical value their US counterparts could tell them. Pending evidence that a two-way traffic could benefit their embattled island, they determined to give away as little as possible. Moreover, as an anguished Whitehall hand scribbled during the 1941 debate about how much to tell a visiting US delegation: ‘What will they think if they find we have been reading their own stuff?’ – a mild embarrassment about which Churchill came clean to Roosevelt on 25 February 1942, with the assurance that decryption of US material had stopped immediately after Pearl Harbor.
The sparse 1940–41 meetings and exchanges between the two nation’s codebreakers and intelligence officers took place in a climate of mutual wariness, and it was the Americans who displayed greater frankness. On 31 August 1940 the British were told that the Signals Intelligence Service had broken the Japanese Purple key. This revelation prompted no immediate invitation to Bletchley: when the Tizard mission visited the US in September to show off such revolutionary technology as the cavity magnetron – a tempting morsel, key to new-age tactical radar, and intended to promote American reciprocity – information about Ultra was explicitly excluded. On the American side, Laurance Safford of the US Navy’s Op-20-G codebreaking team was likewise opposed to sharing its secrets with the British. In December 1940 the two nations reached an agreement to pool information about codebreaking, but both were slow to bring this into effect. Only on Japanese material was there immediate close collaboration: in February 1941 the British cryptanalysis team in Singapore and its American counterpart in the Philippines exchanged liaison officers, who discovered that both were in about the same place with Tokyo’s codes. In the early war years the British did better than the Americans in monitoring some low-level Japanese armed forces traffic, though they failed to break into their higher ciphers. Nonetheless, when British forces in 1941 requested urgent American assistance in securing high-altitude photographs of Japan’s naval bases, Washington vetoed the proposal.
At the height of the Luftwaffe Blitz on Britain two FBI agents, Hugh Clegg and Clarence Hince, visited London to study ‘law enforcement in time of war’. Guy Liddell of MI5 thought that while the visitors looked somewhat thuggish, Clegg seemed ‘a very good fellow’. Such warmth was not reciprocated. On their return, the two men delivered to Hoover a report depicting the British, explicitly MI5 and the Metropolitan Police, in terms of withering scorn. They complained that it was difficult to arrange meetings before 10 a.m. or after 4 p.m. because ‘the transport situation is very difficult, you know’. They said that ‘The fact “exploratory luncheons” were usually two hours in length made our working day rather limited, particularly when compared to the customary hours that officials of the FBI are engaged in official business.’ They concluded that the British ‘might win the war if they find it convenient’. This report set the tone for the FBI’s view of the British for decades thereafter.
In January 1941, when an American codebreaking team – two army, two navy – paid a pioneering visit to Britain, they brought with them a remarkably generous gift: a mimicked Purple machine, of which a second copy was handed over later. The British, however, reciprocated cautiously. With Winston Churchill’s explicit sanction they admitted the visitors to Bletchley, and explained the Hut system. They revealed the bombes, GC&CS’s most critical innovation, but thereafter prevaricated about fulfilling American requests to be given an example of what Washington described as ‘a cypher-solving machine’. There were very good reasons for this – the US was not in the war, and the bombes were scarce pearls. The Americans recognised that they had seen in action a system way ahead of anything the US armed forces were doing. Alfred McCormack, who became the secretary for war’s special assistant on comint, said later of Bletchley: ‘It’s not good – it’s superb.’
Some people in Washington, however, were irked by apparent British pusillanimity. They themselves made little serious headway in reading Enigma traffic until floodgates opened in 1943, and – in the words of an exasperated British officer – ‘showed no appreciation of the extent of the problems facing Bletchley Park and Britain’. The Park’s Washington representative, Captain Edward Hastings, reported in November 1941 that ‘there is grave unrest and dissatisfaction about free exchange of special intelligence’. Some Americans were doggedly convinced that the British were holding out on them. As late as December 1942, when Alan Turing visited the US, he was denied admission to the Bell Laboratories in revenge for alleged British foot-dragging about collaboration, and was finally allowed inside only after a huge and protracted transatlantic row. Although William Friedman later forged warm personal relations with BP’s senior personnel, he himself made his first visit to Britain only in May 1943, about the time a formal and indeed historic intelligence-sharing pact was agreed between the two nations. Meanwhile collaboration remained wary and incomplete. Even after Pearl Harbor, Bletchley and its owners remained fearful not only about American security shortcomings, but also about the danger that this brightest jewel in the imperial crown might somehow be snatched from them by the boundlessly rich, irr
esistibly dominant new partner in the Grand Alliance. Alastair Denniston wrote that for Britain Ultra was ‘almost lifeblood’, whereas the Americans seemed to view Enigma, with the detachment of distance and freedom from mortal peril, merely as ‘a new and very interesting problem’.
The War Office’s deputy director of military intelligence wrote on 17 February 1942, ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, that in talking to the Americans, ‘the general policy is to be as frank as possible but no information will be given regarding our own future operations, or sources of information, nor will any information be passed which emanates from special most secret sources [Ultra]’. On 16 March the cabinet secretary Sir Edward Bridges wrote a memorandum warning that telephone conversations between London and Washington ‘still reveal instances of gross [American] lack of discretion’. Stewart Menzies and his officers at MI6 remained reluctant to open their hearts and files to their new brothers-in-arms.
Unfortunately, the British obfuscation which persisted through much of 1942 prompted misunderstandings and mounting anger among some Americans. These crystallised around a belief – entirely mistaken – that Bletchley had broken into the U-boat Shark key, but was refusing to tell the US Navy about it. Op-20-G’s eventual exasperated riposte to Bletchley’s unwillingness to surrender a bombe was to announce in September 1942 – and to begin to fulfil in August the following year – its own commitment to build four-rotor models by the hundred. This was a time when the British had just thirty-two. The American machines proved technically superior to the British models, and also more reliable: in October 1943 thirty-nine were operational and by December seventy-five, though by the time these became operational much of their capacity proved superfluous to US Navy needs.
In the early war years, British intelligence collaboration with the US was cautious; only from 1943 onwards did it become wholehearted. As with so much else about Anglo–American relations, however, it is less surprising that there was so much squabbling at the outset, in the years of Allied defeat, than that the partnership eventually achieved the intimacy that it did, in the years of victory.
* The Type-X was developed in 1934 by Wing-Commander O.C. Lywood and Ernest Smith of Air Ministry Signals, improving upon a borrowed commercial Enigma, and entered British service three years later.
4
The Dogs that Barked
1 ‘LUCY’S’ PEOPLE
The extraordinary incident of the Kremlin’s dogs in the night was that they barked, and barked. Operation ‘Barbarossa’, the June 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, was the defining event of the Second World War – and its most baffling, because it achieved surprise when its imminence was manifest. It was a tribute to the length and strength of Stalin’s arm that humint – agents of influence abroad – provided him with comprehensive warnings. As early as July 1940, NKVD men operating in German-occupied Poland were reporting intense Wehrmacht activity, barrack-building and troop movements. That autumn, he instructed Centre to open a special file on Hitler’s intentions codenamed ‘Zateya’ – ‘Venture’. In September this showed massive German redeployments close to the Russian border, together with continuing construction of troop accommodation. The Germans’ Moscow embassy was reported by a Soviet agent within its walls to be striving to recruit White Russians and intellectual dissidents for the Abwehr. In November 1940 Stalin was told that eighty-five divisions, comprising more than two-thirds of Hitler’s infantry, were deployed along the Russian frontier.
During the months that followed, however, some of these troops were shifted to threaten, and then to occupy, Romania and Greece. Neither in 1941 nor since have most Westerners grasped the intensity of Stalin’s conviction that Hitler’s ambitions were focused on the Balkans, where Russia also had vital interests. Nor do they acknowledge the depth of his hatred and distrust of Britain. It was barely twenty years since Winston Churchill had led a crusade to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution by force of arms. Stalin saw himself, by no means mistakenly, as the object of a sustained Churchillian campaign to drive a wedge into his pact with Hitler and force him to fight Germany, against Russia’s interests and in pursuit of those of the British Empire.
The master of the Kremlin recognised that war between the Nazis and the Soviet Union might ultimately prove unavoidable. An August 1940 GRU report, quoting Hitler’s ambassador in Belgrade, showed that this was certainly the other party’s view: ‘For Germany the Balkans are the most significant asset and ought to be included in the [Nazi-controlled] new order of Europe; but since the USSR would never agree to that, a war with her is inevitable.’ Stalin, however, remained convinced that it was overwhelmingly against Hitler’s interests to break the Nazi–Soviet Pact that was delivering huge supplies of oil and commodities to Germany. He believed it was in the Kremlin’s gift to appoint the hour for a showdown, which was not yet. He clung to the view, slavishly endorsed by Beria, that Hitler was engaged in a massive bluff, designed to cow Russia into letting Germany have its way in the Balkans. Augusto Rosso, the Italian ambassador in Moscow, wrote on 21 September 1940: ‘The Germans have raised a barrier [against the Russians]: the march to the south has been stopped, the oil is at the disposal of the Germans … The Danube is a German river. This is the first diplomatic defeat of Comrade Stalin … and the defeat is even more humiliating because it explodes the dream which throughout the centuries has occupied a special place in the Russian soul: [dominance] of the southern meridian.’
Friedrich von der Schulenberg, Germany’s ambassador, helped to assuage Moscow’s fears about Berlin’s intentions, because his own honesty and sincerity were manifest, and directed towards preserving peace. Beria told Stalin that once Vichy France and Spain had joined the Axis as expected, Hitler planned to induce him to join a pact that would close a steel ring around Britain: ‘Pressure was to be exerted on Russia,’ the Soviet intelligence supremo wrote on 24 October 1940, ‘to reach a political agreement with Germany which would demonstrate to the entire world that the Soviet Union will not hold aloof, and actively join the struggle against Britain, to secure a new European order.’ In November Molotov was dispatched to Berlin, to discover ‘the real intentions of Germany’s proposals for the New Europe’. The foreign minister made plain that Stalin still sought control of the mouth of the Danube, which Hitler had no intention of conceding, and the visit confirmed Germany’s leader in his commitment to war.
The NKVD’s informants in London asserted, correctly, that many of Britain’s businessmen and bankers favoured a compromise peace. Moscow was appalled by such a prospect, which would make Hitler unstoppable. The Kremlin aspired to see Germany weakened, to make Hitler more biddable. Thus, for all Stalin’s disdain for Churchill and his people, he was delighted by British successes against the Luftwaffe at home and the Italians in North Africa. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, waxed lyrical about the prospects, writing on 3 November 1940: ‘England has not merely survived, but has strengthened its position compared with that which prevailed after the fall of France … in the “Battle of Britain”. Hitler, like Napoleon 135 years earlier, has suffered a defeat, his first serious setback of this war; the consequences are impossible to foresee.’
Through the winter of 1940–41, Stalin was battered by contrary winds and fears. The NKVD and GRU reported insistently and accurately, on the authority of its secret Whitehall informants, that the British were considering a bomber assault on his Baku oil wells, which were supplying Russian fuel to the Luftwaffe. The Kremlin was even more dismayed by Axis preparations to invade Greece, which could presage seizure of the Dardanelles, a centuries-old Russian nightmare. If Turkey came into the war on either side, Stalin thought its army liable to invade the Caucasus, of which the Ottomans had been dispossessed barely seventy years earlier. Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s deputy, reported intense Turkish intelligence activity on the Russian border. Meanwhile the Turks, for their part, were fearful of Nazi aggression, and in January 1941 their embassies began to brief the Russians about the German build-up in
Romania. The GRU asserted on 27 January 1941 that the Balkans ‘remained the decisive focus of political events, particularly since a headlong clash of German and Soviet vital interests has arisen there’.
But although Stalin was receiving a stream of intelligence about the Nazi threat to the Balkans, there was a torrent about the direct menace to the Soviet Union. On 5 December 1940 Vladimir Dekanozov, Soviet ambassador in Berlin and a veteran intelligence officer, received an anonymous letter: ‘To Comrades Stalin and Molotov, very urgent. Russia, please be alert, as Hitler is soon going to attack you. It will soon be too late, but Russia is asleep now. Can’t you see what is happening on the borders, from Memel to the Black Sea? East Prussia is filled with troops, new units are arriving day and night …’ Moscow was informed by its Berlin military attaché just eleven days after Hitler signed his Directive 21 on 18 December, calling on the Wehrmacht ‘to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign’. In mid-March 1941 the Soviet military attaché in Bucharest reported a German officer telling a friend: ‘We have completely altered our plans. We aim at the East, at the USSR. We shall seize the Soviets’ grain, coal and oil. We shall then be invincible and will be able to continue the war against England and the United States.’
